The AnyPerk founder tells this heartwarming tale of how his team was inspired by Paul Graham to move to Silicon Valley to start a company. They had no money so they lived in a borrowed car. Hundreds of investors turned them down. Then they got into YC and raised $4.5M and everyone lived happily ever after.

This story makes me quite sad because YC has a less than 3% acceptance rate. How many founders are still out there, sleeping in cars, unable to raise $4.5M and rejected from YC?

We romanticize the idea of bootstrapping, of starting and growing a business with existing resources. These days it means having a lot of resources to begin with.

Are we supposed to applaud the Stanford students bootstrapping a startup from their dorm room while taking laundry to their parents’ home in Atherton on weekends? Just kidding, they use Washio.

That the AnyPerk CEO booked a one-way ticket to America with the sum total of his worldly possessions in a suitcase makes headlines because it is so very rare..

For everyone else, bootstrapping is great! Worst case scenario, your startup fails and you get a job at Google making $150k slinging code. You can code, can’t you?