Back to the Startup

Now that my computers are all upgraded to Windows 7 (and the upgrade from Vista to 7 was a joke it was so easy and painless), it is now time to revert back to the startup efforts.

The original IP has now spawned 4 different companies that we hope to build out over the next 2 years. We are now trying to figure out our best path forward and I have been introduced to the concept of bootstrapping.

So the first company - whose prototype should be completed in a couple of weeks - would probably sell in 7 months for between $50M and $75M given all of the inputs I have received up to this point. That stated, the only different between the solution at the end of the proof-of-concept phase and the full version is a bunch of grunt work that, while significant, has been done before for other projects. In fact this work is not even cutting edge - just monotonous and detailed.

Given this latter fact, the main investor right now wants to essentially sacrifice the potential value of this first company in order to get money in the door without sacrificing ownership - hence bootstrapping. He strongly feels that companies will easily purchase the proof-of-concept (and it is actually already quite a system...) for between $15M and $20M and that we can take $3M of that and used it for the building out of the other, more valuable, commercialization options.

He calls this a necessary sacrifice for a long term gain but let's be honest - his "sacrifice" would make me a millionaire...SACRIFICE AWAY:)!!!