Small is cool - no doubt about it (we are a small company as well) - but entrepreneurs need to have realistic expectations about what they are trying to achieve and whether or not they should be talking to VCs or not.

Having a prominent backer can provide some visibility, but lack of it hasn’t hindered us. McObject (www.mcobject.com), which develops embedded database software, has grown a customer list that any VC-backed venture would die for. In our biggest licensing yet, just yesterday we announced DIRECTV would use our eXtremeDB database technology to manage programming in its set-top boxes (see (link) ).

You see many veterans of successful bootstrap ventures go on to utilize this model – it’s as though, once you see it can be done, there’s no going back to the distraction and loss of control of venture funding.

Furthermore, starting very small makes for an awesome experience and while “seeded startups” will waste most of their time writing up “reports” for their “angels”, the “free agents” will be investing 100% of their time growing their company.

Others might see things differently and that’s fine with me.

Now the company - a wholesale directory of creative entrepreneurs targeted to specialty retailers - makes us a lovely “lifestyle” income and makes our clients happy. Isn’t that really why we’re all entrepreneurs?

I learned something significant at every session I went to, and everyone was eager to introduce themselves… to ask what I did. That’s a change!

Congrats to Michael and team; great article, Alistair!

In our case (questionpro) it took a longer time to build the company cause we had to chase every dollar since we completely relied on self-funding, and more importantly client funding (aka license revenue.) — but after some time, we got good at it.

Of course you could say we are lucky - (which we definitely are.) - but we were quite frankly also not “plugged in” the VC scene either in the Seattle or Bay Area - so it was easier for us to ask money from clients than from VC’s!

-v
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