Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Boris Shapiro


Just when you thought you'd never here about another tie between business and Chinese warfare, blogger Joshua Baer's got another one.

Baer shares this excerpt from a book by Dan Ariely:

In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch'in) dynasty. Pausing on the banks of the river for the night, his troops awakened in the morning to find, to their horror, that their ships were burning. They hurried to their feet to fight off the attackers, but soon discovered that it was Xiang Yu himself who had set their ships on fire, and that he had also ordered all the cooking pots crushed.

With no route for retreat, the army had no choice but to be victorious...or, of course, be defeated.

Twice while at the helm of a bootstrapped company (Skylist), Baer says he made similar decisions changing course away from one line of business and group of customers for another strengthening the company each time but also running a considerable risk.

However, there's at least one other way that the story of Xiang Yu gets close to the core of the bootstrapping ethic, it seems to me.

Without the cushion of outside investment, bootstrappers are forced to enter the battle immediately and find out decisively whether or not their business model can be a success.

Like Xiang Yu's warriors who had no means of escape, bootstrappers with no cash flow other than what they create cannot avoid getting their product or service before the customer or avoid their feedback positive or negative.