bootstrapped

Definition

Building a company with personal savings, credit cards, and stress ulcers instead of venture capital—either a badge of honor or an excuse for slow growth, depending on your exit results. It's entrepreneurship on hard mode.

Example Usage

We're proudly bootstrapped, which means profitable but growing at the speed of molasses while watching VC-funded competitors lose $10M annually to steal our customers.

Origin

From 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,' an impossible physical feat turned into entrepreneurial metaphor

Fun Fact

Mailchimp grew bootstrapped to a $12 billion exit without taking VC money, making it simultaneously inspiring and statistically irrelevant to most founders.

Source: Entrepreneurship and startup financing terminology

Related Terms

Beginner

founder dilution

The reduction in founders' ownership percentage that occurs each time the company raises money or issues new equity. It's the slow, inevitable erosion of ownership that founders signed up for when they took outside capital.

🚀 Startup / VC

Beginner

graduation round

When a startup raises funding from institutional VCs after initially bootstrapping or taking only angel money. It's like moving from community college to the Ivy League, complete with higher expectations.

🚀 Startup / VC

Beginner

vulture capitalist

A pejorative term for investors who swoop in during distressed situations to extract maximum value at founders' expense. The same people who call themselves 'value investors' on their websites.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

scaling

The corporate fantasy of growing a business exponentially while somehow maintaining quality, usually uttered right before everything falls apart. It's the process of increasing capacity to handle growth—or in startup speak, the thing you'll figure out later after raising millions in VC funding. In tech, it means making systems handle more users; in reality, it means discovering all the shortcuts you took when building the foundation.

🚀 Startup / VC

Advanced

reps and warranties

Legal promises in investment agreements where founders swear everything they've said is true and the company isn't hiding skeletons. Breaking these can result in personal liability, making due diligence the most stressful time to discover that intern you hired in 2019 never signed an IP assignment.

🚀 Startup / VC

Beginner

spray and pray

An investment strategy of making many small bets across countless startups, hoping a few will hit big enough to compensate for the inevitable carnage. The venture capital equivalent of buying lottery tickets in bulk.

🚀 Startup / VC

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