At Bootstrappers Breakfast We Help Every Entrepreneur Who Attends to Succeed

The venture capital ecosystem evaluates a large number of startups, makes investments in few percent, and counts on one in ten of those to become a huge success. The Bootstrappers Breakfast welcomes any entrepreneur who is bootstrapping a business and strives to help every entrepreneur who attends to succeed.

At Bootstrappers Breakfast We Help Every Entrepreneur Who Attends to Succeed

Our goals

1. Help every entrepreneur who attends to succeed in establishing and growing their business.
2. Provide a community of practice for bootstrapping entrepreneurs to compare notes, network, and assist each other.
3. Meet face to face early in the morning so that you can meet when you are fresh and still do a full day’s work.
4. Welcome experienced entrepreneurs and bootstrapper-friendly service providers who are willing to address the practical realities and real challenges of getting a startup off the ground.
5. Offer sustained support in a low key atmosphere that allowed an entrepreneur to gather a variety of perspectives on their current challenges.
6. Help everyone to succeed to the best of their ability: talk about managing failure and bouncing back from setbacks and lessons learned as much as seizing opportunities.

In Contrast to a VC Model that Picks Winners

The Bootstrappers Breakfast model stands  in stark contrast to the baseline VC model, which makes some different assumptions:

1. There will only be a few big winners created in a given year. Wealth creation for VC partners and their investors (limited partners) is predicated on finding these few big winners.
2. Rapid growth is a key goal: outside investment enables startups to run at a loss for a year or two before needing either additional investment or creating an exit of some sort.
3. Many startups they invest in will fail completely. In fact, traditional VC funds would prefer to push a portfolio firm to hit a home run and fail, than return shares in a small profitable privately held firm at the end of a fund’s life (typically a decade).

A related model is the startup accelerator. This model was pioneered by firms like Ycombinator, Techstars, and 500 Startups. They make essentially the same assumptions as the VC firms do, except that their time frame is a semester. Their startups have 10 to 15 weeks to go from acceptance to  a “Demo Day” where they can secure additional investment. Not all complete the race successfully.

There is an alternate venture model that provides royalty-based financing (or RBF, this also referred to as revenue-based financing). These firms make high-interest loans secured by cash flow, instead of investing and taking equity–this distinct from a bridge loan which is designed to convert to equity and is part of the traditional VC repertoire.  RBF firms’ profits are derived from interest on the loan and a share of revenue until the loan is repaid. They have a very different investment thesis but are still trying to pick winners: they focus on finding startups that have reliable revenue streams and are growing. But they prefer a reliable loan repayment over rapid growth that risks bankruptcy and default. Prominent examples include Royalty Capital, Lighter Capital, and Indie.vc.

Bootstrappers Breakfast Invites You To Join
Entrepreneurs Who Eat Problems For Breakfast

Related Blog Posts

• Something Ventured: Make Money and Change the World for the Better
• Don’t Get Distracted Raising Venture Capital
• Dan Scheinman’s Blue Ocean Venture Strategy: Target Entrepreneurs Over 35
• The Venture Lifestyle Business
• Three Excellent “Micro Hacks” from VentureHacks
• Mike Lanza: Starting Companies Without Venture Capital
• Three Key Points About Seeking Investment