VentureBlog is an all around excellent insight into the Venture Capital process and mindset. Even if your microbusiness can never aspire to venture capital funding you could do much worse than subscribing to the RSS feed for this blog.
One of today's entries is a slight rebuttal to a piece on BusinessWeek Online about the process of boostrapping your company
As we've said before, the VC route isn't for every company. But it's easy to disagree with Kenton's reasoning in the article, which is more along the line of "VCs bad"
Me, I'm a firm believer in 'boostrapping', having gone through much of the process with GlobalGreyhounds.com which has never received any outside funding. In fact we've gone from a stage where my partner and I were several thousand in debt two years ago to where we are now, making a small but steadily growing profit.
As defined by Dictionary.com, to bootstrap is -
To promote and develop by use of one's own initiative and work without reliance on outside help: “We've bootstrapped our way back with aggressive tourism and recruiting high tech industries”
But I prefer Dave Winer's description -
"When engineers build a suspension bridge, first they draw a thin cable across a body of water. Then they use that cable to hoist a larger one. Then they use both cables to pull a third, and eventually create a thick cable of intertwined wires that you can drive a truck across (actually hundreds of trucks).That's a bootstrap. First you take a step you know is on the path, learn from it, and use it to lift up the next level."
Oh yeah, the BusinessWeek Online article is worth a read but doesn't really say a whole lot.
Sorry guys for diverting the topic(s....I just wonder if anybody out there that might be interested in investing on a business project in Romania?!....I`am from there and I would love to hear someone giving us an idea regarding this very important matter to me... For the last few days I just can`t stop thinking about this: after doing lots of researches I realized that this is the bigest business plan for a country like Romania....A biodiesel processor(this equiment is made in Sweden and the cost is about 350000.00 now I have about 20 percent of this huge amonut of money and I have some land back in Romania, but that doesn`t help me enough.I tried a few banks and institutions in Ireland but, they only want to help me if I will open the business in Ireland, which is imposible because of the prime material conditions in Ireland, back in Romania there is a great source of rapeseeds, sunflower, etc. because of the climate... for producing high amounts of biodiesel) that can produce from 100 to 8000L in 24/ph and it can bring astouned profits in short or long terms. If anybody wants to give us any help, a partnership or any idea at all is more than welcome. Tel.016409904
With respect and no anticipation, Thank you
Posted by: Dan | February 15, 2006 at 01:11 PM