That only works if your product requires essentially no capital to develop.

You start small and scale up, bootstrap from smaller related projects.

For example, if I wanted to be the "next Google" I'd work as a consultant on Apache Solr and Apache Nutch, build up capital, then find a search niche that is not well served but potentially lucrative (fields of science and medicine spring to mind), build a usable proof of concept, sell subscriptions at a cut-price rate (whilst still in beta), then look to hire and scale, then look to expand into new markets after the core product is stable.

So you see, even with the largest of corporate ambitions, you're still able to bootstrap on next to nothing.

Actually, I think "don't hire anyone else" only works if you have very limited labor needs in order to achieve profitability; its almost orthogonal to capital requirements.

Capital goes on:

People Machinery and infrastructure (which may or may not include office space) Sales and marketing

It would be very interesting to see if there's a difference in the way successful and failed startups prioritise these different areas.

I suspect for tech people dev spend is overrated and marketing spend is underrated - but that's just a hunch with no numbers to support it.

How would you hire someone without capital?

See my reply to hueving.