The benefits of bootstrapping

`1:16:26`

them and it sounds like they have some similar points of view. Where those came from, I don't know. Maybe they materialized out of nowhere. Maybe they picked them up from someone else. Maybe they came up with them themselves. Lots of different ways to work. It's nice to hear that other people are trying some of these things and it's working for them, so that's great. The thing with the VC route, so the idea of having too much money, it doesn't mean you can't work efficiently and thoughtfully. But it does create a degree of sloppiness, because you don't have to. When you don't have to, and when I'm saying have to, you could say have to what? Have to do a whole bunch of things. When you don't have to, we don't have to make money, when you don't have to be efficient, when you don't have to be profitable, you just get sloppy.

`1:17:16`

"Let's hire some more people. Whatever, we can afford to. In fact, they need us to spend the money, by the way. They didn't give us the money to save it and earn 6% interest." Which would be great now. Three years ago, 0% interest. "They didn't give us the money to sit in the bank. They gave us the money to spend the money." What are you going to spend it on? Two things, people and marketing. Basically, that's what you spend it on. We can buy more ads. We can do more of this. We're going to do that. We can hire some more people, build up more teams, do more things simultaneously. There's a certain sloppiness in that. I think it just becomes harder when the environment encourages slop, which is why I think the value in bootstrapping is that it teaches entrepreneurs, it not even teaches, it forces them to have to figure out how to make money. The more time under the curve they have making money and practicing making money, the better

`1:18:05`

at it they're going to get. I used the guitar metaphor a bit earlier, I'll use it again. If you're playing guitar, if I give you a guitar and ask you to go up on stage and play guitar, you're going to suck. It's going to be horribly embarrassing and you're going to be terrible at it. You might be terrible at it a month later, but you'll be slightly better at it. You do it for six months or a year, you're going to be better and better. And then, five years and you're really getting good. Why do we think that a business that is sloppy, that doesn't have to make their own money, that is just getting pumped full of money by somebody else, can all of a sudden turn on the profit spigot and all of a sudden be profitable? What you see is that they oftentimes cannot because they're just not set up to be that way. They've never played guitar before, and now they're being asked to play guitar. The reason I think it's great for entrepreneurs to start bootstrapping is because they just have more practice making money.