CoolTech Club: Bootstrapping in the Silicon Valley
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January 13,2009
Bootstrapping in the Silicon Valley
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Bootstrapping is a term used to cover different methods for
avoiding using the financial resources of external investors. While bootstrapping involves a risk for the founders, the
absence of any other
stakeholder
gives the founders more freedom to develop the company.
Wikipedia.
With looming financial crisis and total disarray of local Venture Capital, do startups have any sound alternative but just roll over and die quietly?
How about good old , but somehow forgotten, "bootstrapping" strategy ? Thomas Edison , Alexander Bell and Michael Dell didn't spend to much time waiting for "Sand Hill Road" to get up to speed, aren't they? Is it still possible to build successful companies without VC backing in our times?
CoolTech Club presents a panel of three distinguished Club
members who have personal experience of building successful Silicon Valley
companies with "no VCs money down". They gracefully agreed to share with
us their stories, strategies, advantages and pitfalls of bootstrapping, and so
on.
- Yakov Kamen, Relevad CEO and co-founder. Relevad Corporation (www.relevad.com) is a semantic keyword analytics company. We’ve created the largest search engine agnostic Keyword Data Center and developed a Universal Platform for deep keyword and unstructured text analysis, and provide a wide spectrum of services optimizing ad placement economics, business security, and decision-making intelligence for search engine operators, ad network aggregators, advertisers, and publishers.
- Timothy Kay is CTO and co-founder of Boopsie, Inc. (http://www.boopsie.com), which has been in bootstrap mode for the past two years. The company offers a suite of products that make it easy to access large enterprise data sets from mobile phones. The products are finished and in shipping, and the company is now busy finding companies who need to access data sets from mobile phones.
- Ron Warshawsky is CTO and founder of DBA InfoPower. DBA InfoPower (http://www.dbainfopower.com) is an innovative software and services company specializing in Enterprise Performance Problem Management. DBA InfoPower solutions help IT find and fix performance problems in business-critical applications, websites and data centers with unprecedented speed, accuracy, precision, and scope.
Tuesday, January 13,2008
7:00pm - 10:00pm
(Please be on time - we need to close doors at 7:15.
Feel free to call me at 408-4803190 if you need any assistance).
DLA Piper
2000 University Avenue
East Palo Alto, California
94303
(Just behind Four Seasons hotel)
(driving directions : http://www.dlapiper.com/global/about/offices/office.aspx?office=12&show=directions )
7:00-7:15 - Welcome and Networking
7:15-7:20 - Welcome address and Club news
7:20-9:00 - Bootstrapping in the Silicon Valley
9:00-9:15 - Break and Networking
9:15-10:00 - Open Discussion !