Bootstrapping

Are you deciding to launch a company. You have a great product and need venture capital to get you started. According to Greg Gianforte CEO, RightNow Technologies that isn't the case. His secret bootstrapping.

"How do you launch a successful high-tech business? If you ask the typical MBA, they'’ll give the same answer. Write a comprehensive in-depth business plan, take it to investors to secure a healthy initial round of funding, recruit the heaviest heavyweights you can, and start the PR machine cranking. But, of course, they’d be completely wrong." link

The best part of the article are the comments about MBAs. I always see jobs asking for people with MBAs but never asking for people who can add value to the company.

"The good thing about bootstrapping is that the company cannot afford expensive fluff and so we tend to have few MBAs and when we do hire them it is to do administrative tasks and we leave the real strategy to the entrepreneurial business people."

"I have my own view on MBAs as a PR person and it is this: if a client tells me they have a MBA, I know we're in trouble. I have never come across another qualification that provides so much misplaced self-belief."

The reason I like these comments have to do with my most recent experience. I started working for this company producing all their marketing material. After a month they hired someone who had almost completed an MBA and had this fancy job title in their previous position. They paraded this person in, took them to lunch, they were acting as if it were Christmas, there was excitement in the air. Meetings were being held involving this new person. They didn't take me out to lunch when I started. The owner of the company was speaking to me differently making me aware that the savior had arrived.

After I met this person I quickly came to a snap judgment, you know in a BLINK. I said to myself I don't think so. After a few months the air had settled and the tables had turned. This new person then began to tell me about what was happening. The owner of the company was asking why they were not selling. He wanted sales and new accounts. All I know was that they were thinking of firing this person. So obvious it was this person had already began going on job interviews.

On the other hand after seeing the response the company was receiving from work I had done they began to look at me and treat me differently. You see I was a someone with a design education amongst a group of people with business degrees.