Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Francis Fischbach interviewed Dave Stubenvoll of Wowza Media http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/01/25/founder-story-dave-s...

Dave offered a number of useful "lessons learned" for bootstrappers. Wowza is bootstrapping a Flash Streaming Server and making headway in the niche of their choosing against Adobe. My three key take-aways were

1. If you are a lone entrepreneur, team up.

2. Figure out how to get it rolling without quitting your day job.

3. Don't "Build to Flip." Dave notes: “if I was dependent upon the sale of this company to some single entity, I probably wouldn’t survive. I would be doing things to sell as opposed to doing things to make sure that the business is around next year and the year after, and the year after.”

There's a lot more there: he has been involved as a founder or the early stages of five startups (two that were intrapreneurial or internal startups at Intuit and Adobe).



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: