Cirque du Soleil is a fine example of a bootstrap venture in the arts!

Excellent article on some of the macro-technology trends making bootstrapping even easier.

Quote:

The Web has since become a platform, and building new businesses on that platform is no longer a multimillion-dollar proposition. Most new Web businesses nowadays are started with less than half a million dollars, and it's rare to find one that wants to use money from an initial public offering to get to profitability.

The reason? Start-ups are leveraging nearly a decade's worth of work on technologies that are now not only proven, but also free, or very nearly so. Open-source software can now do nearly everything that Oracle, I.B.M. and Microsoft specialized in back in the 90's. And the cost of computing and bandwidth? You can now lease a platform that can handle millions of customers for less than $500 a month. In the 90's, such a platform would have run tens of thousands of dollars or more a month.

Greg, the founder/CEO of RightNow and author of the new book, Bootstrapping Your Business, recently gave a talk at a TiE Institute event in Santa Clara. You can download a pdf (2MB) of the talk and view it on the website.

To EVERY bootstrapper (and entrepreneur thinking about starting a company): WATCH THIS - and watch it twice! It will be the best use of an hour (or 2) of your time. Greg makes a clear and convincing case for Bootstrapping and a devastating case against the VC/investor-focused approach to starting companies. He also outlines the simple, yet powerful rules of bootstrapping with a fun quiz at the end to drive his points home.

I'm looking forward to reading Greg's book and will post my reactions.

In an earlier post, I discussed Christa and Jeanne-Claude. The Bootstrap Foundation is an organization in San Francisco, that helps artists get their work to their audience/customer.