> Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your other businesses). I'd rather call that "expanding" your existing business or "pivoting" rather than bootstrapping.
That seems like a crazy distinction. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps means not getting outside assistance. Growth through reinvesting your profits is entirely the deal. Otherwise what else on earth could it mean?
We started Cygnus with 15K (about 30K in today's dollars; it was 5K from each founder) and didn't take outside money for seven years at which point we have about 150 employees and had never had an unprofitable month after month 3 (though the three of us had to skip paychecks some months during the first year, and I gave the company free rent for a few months -- but staff always got a paycheck).
edit: It wasn't just the cash; we also had an old Sun-3 that Sun had somehow appeared -- still had a Sun property sticker -- plus we had the first production prototype of the "pizza box" sparcstation which had in fact been legitimately given away.