(Editor: Welcome to the second installment of an interview with Bijoy Goswami here at BootStrapMe.com. Bijoy is a co-founder of Aviri, a company dedicated to promoting innovation among entrepreneurs and organizations, and an evangelist for the bootstrap approach for building businesses and other groups. Below he talks about the dynamics of the "founding team" and the origins of the Bootstrap Network.)

SH: You've often articulated a very social dimension to the bootstrapping process with a team of founders instead of the lone entrepreneur as the catalyst for the bootstrapping process. Why is that important and why do you feel it is crucial to the process?



BG: Indeed. Even though stories tend to focus on the lone entrepreneur, it's rarely the case that one person is sufficient to get a company going. Bootstrapping requires very different capabilities - creating the new product versus getting it to customers - and those talents are rarely embodied in one person. Think of Steve Jobs (Evangelist) versus Steve Wozniak (Maven). I've written about these different energies in my book, The Human Fabric (www.thehumanfabric.com).

It goes beyond the founding team, though. In building a community for bootstrappers over these last 4+ years, we've learned that bootstrappers provide the best support for each other, which comes in the form of encouragement, resources, advice and collaborations. This is also why I encourage entrepreneurs to come together (http://www.abdmag.com/come_together_right_now_over_us.htm) and why we offer services to cities to help them create Bootstrap communities of their own (http://www.bootstrapaustin.org/wiki/index.php/Bootstrap_City).

SH: To what degree do you think the team needs to start out together and could this as easily be a team of entrepreneurs offering complimentary but individual products or services who each started out alone but find ways of working together to produce a business greater than the sum of its parts? In other words, if I've got a great idea and strike out alone without a team already in place, am I wasting my time or can the team grow organically as I move forward in my efforts?

BG: Bootstrappers always do what it takes to make forward progress. If you don't have a partner, making this progress on your own will likely attract the right partner(s)! The traditional model of founders forming a company together is also not necessary. Two bootstrappers can collaborate to create joint products and services. As an example, all the products and services of the Bootstrap Network are collaborations - for the Bootstrap Bootcamp DVD, I worked with Joshua Shipsey, founder of Communication Simulations.

SH: How did the Bootstrap Network and Bootstrap Bootcamp get started? Can you describe what they are, how they came to be and why you think they're important?

BG: The Bootstrap Network came, literally, from my desire to reclaim my time. I was meeting one-on-one with so many entrepreneur friends all through the early part of 2003, that it was becoming a huge time sink. I figured that getting them together for beers at a local pub and introducing them to each other would put a stop to all that. I was quite surprised when at the end of that first three hour session, my friends asked me when the next one was. With a sigh, I looked at my watch and said, "it's the second Monday, I guess that's when we'll meet next." Since then, the community has evolved a very unique Contributor model which allows bootstrappers to contribute to the community and use it to develop their products and services.

This is also a great example of me not realizing that I was being given a lab to develop the bootstrap model itself. It took me a long time to see the Bootstrap Network as an integral part of my own bootstrap journey, rather than something separate from it.

(Read more about the Bootstrap Bootcamp in the next installment of the interview with Bijoy Goswami here at BootStrapMe.com)