Building Your Drupal Businesses: Venture Capital Investment vs Bootstrapping

There are many ways to build a Drupal business:

• Are you building a consultancy, a support service, a technology product, or a subscription service?
• Are you optimizing for yours and your employee's lifestyle, risk management, or do you want to swing for the fences?
• What is your strategy and execution plan?

Getting aligned on these high-level questions is incredibly important but can be challenging for founding teams. Our goal in this session is to help you understand how these questions will affect your decision making as you build your company.

Ryan and Zack between them have started a two consulting companies, a non-profit, and three technology service companies that today employ > 200 Drupalists. They have seen these questions play out in many different situations and understand the trade-offs intimately. Luckily, many truths about building great businesses remain constant.

During this session we will discuss:

• How personal lifestyle decisions of founders dictate company direction
• How to build the optimal founding team
• The benefits and downsides of bootstrapping
• The advantages and risks of venture capital (and how to go about raising it)
• Spinning out companies from corporate parents
• Balancing time across multiple simultaneous ventures
• Building and scaling teams