Patrick Campbell: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think you're in there. So you tell me if I'm missing anything, but basically you bootstrapped a company, sold it for 200 million. I don't know if I've heard of anything like that. So what's your hot take? What are mistakes people make around bootstrapping? The basic idea is bootstrapping is for lifestyle businesses that want to cash flow. Funding is for companies trying to create a billion dollars in annual revenue. And that answer offends everybody. That answer offends the indie friends I have, they're going to be like, "Oh, what about Basecamp [inaudible 00:12:43], ProfitWell?" And I'll tell you, ProfitWell, this was a big mistake. Yes, it was a great exit, we sold for over $200 million, et cetera, but we probably, if we had taken money, we could have had a billion-dollar exit or we could have kept going. And we should have taken money earlier in our life cycle. This was actually a big mistake because we got hooked on the efficiency and that was great, but we could have moved even quicker than we were. And hindsight is 20/20, and I'm obviously not crying over this, but it's one of those things that I think that you have to know who you are and you have to know what your goals are for a company. And our biggest thing was we wanted to build a big company and we were going after that, but we weren't doing the things in order to actually make that happen, which is i.e. getting funded. So yeah, that's my hot take and hopefully I offend everyone. But it's also just the end of the Twitter argument where it's like, "Yeah, it depends," but that's the thing to think about. It's interesting because usually you hear from the other end, someone that raised VC money is like, "I shouldn't have raised money, I should have bootstrapped this thing longer." It's cool to hear from the other side someone that did that like, "No, we maybe should have raised the VC money along the way."…

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