Full House in Sunnyvale This Morning

We’ve added a Bootstrappers Breakfast Meetup Group to complement this blog, the LinkedIn group, and the CentralDesktop private workspace (the latter two are available to folks who have attended two meetings). It brought a number of first time folks to this morning’s breakfast: we ended up with 16 folks around the table at Coco’s. We had a nice comment from one first time attendee named Beena who was exploring how to start a non-profit to address the needs of the spouses of immigrants to Silicon Valley:

Anyone who has a high tech start up can attend this meeting. Depending on which stage of your business, you will get useful inputs from other members based on their experience that can help you improve your situation.

There was some good news from a returning member who had just landed a contract with the Army for documentation generation and management tools and was staffing up and another who has reached a level of business that has gotten the interest of several early stage VC’s; his team has started some second round interviews despite the downturn. It was a broad ranging group discussion and a number of one on one conversations after our 9am wrap.

I mentioned Sequoia Capital’s “Good Times RIP” presentation during the breakfast, it’s available here:

• http://www.slideshare.net/eldon/sequoia-capital-on-startups-and-the-economic-downturn-presentation?type=powerpoint
• http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1822343/Sequoia-Venture-Capital-Warning-to-CEOs

Comments from three posts plus some interesting follow on discussions on Hacker News as well.

• A CEO’s Sequoia Meeting Notes on Lance Weatherby (excerpted from the Funded)
• Hackers News Thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327937
• Sequoia Capital: Armchair Quarterbacks on 37Signals
• Hackers News Thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=331202
• Sequoia’s Advice is Good Advice Any Time on VentureHacks
• Which had the following excellent advice
  “In good times and bad, startups should be asking themselves the same questions:
1. What’s our runway?
2. What experiments are we running to extend our runway? (e.g. chasing revenue, raising capital, taking debt, writing grant proposals, cutting burn, grabbing market share in the hopes that it will help us raise capital later, et cetera)
3. How long will we try the experiments before we switch to plan B?
4. What’s plan B?”