Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 55. Don't Forget about Bootstrapping

David Brown

David Brown is the president of ZOLL Medical Corporation. He is also one of the co-founders of TechStars, and has been a mentor since 2007.

When David Cohen and I started Pinpoint Technologies in 1993, I wish we had a program like TechStars. We had no mentors other than a former boss or two, we had no funding opportunities, and we didn't even know what an angel investor was. So we had to make it up as we went along and in many cases, reinvent the wheel.

One of the silver linings (at least with the benefit of my retrospectascope) is that without funding opportunities, we had to bootstrap our business. We had no money of our own, so we were forced to be extremely frugal. Armed with a few thousand dollars earned nights and weekends doing odd consulting work (including the glorious job of pulling cable and installing a network for a pest control company), we created a prototype and persuaded a prospective customer to lend us $100,000 in exchange for a free product and a repayment of the loan with interest. That product, without any additional investment, has now spawned a company with $40 million in annual sales and two hundred employees.

The value in bootstrapping wasn't so much that we retained 100 percent of the stock when we exited (although that was nice). More important to us was the ability to run the business as we saw fit, ...