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Comment by wensing | Hacker News Reader

When you say that "Bootstrapping a startup is stressful", are you only referring to the time before you raised the $2.5 million? How long was that?

EDIT: According to CrunchBase you raised $500K two months after your company was founded, and another $2 million 13 months later. I'm sure you just used the word without thinking much about it, but technically you bootstrapped for all of 8 weeks. :)

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I thought the same thing when I read it: starts by mentioning $2.5m in funding, then talks about bootstrapping. Those things are mutually exclusive.

Sometimes people work on things before they found a company around it.

I hope there is more to this.8 weeks is like an extended holiday. I've been bootstraping for a year now and yes it is difficult but not that difficult.

Why is there this overwhelmingly anti-bootstrapping sentiment present in the startup community? What's so wrong with taking outside funding?

If you take outside funding, you're not bootstrapping. According to Wikipedia:

"Bootstrapping in business means starting a business without external help or capital."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping#Business

There is nothing wrong with taking outside funding, but then you don't get to call it bootstrapping any more (as per the widely-accepted definition above of what the term means).

This is mixing up terms.

I should have clarified that I was trying to ask a more general question as to why bootstrapping is seen as a superior way of starting a company as opposed to taking on funding.

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