Xconomy Texas — San Antonio — What’s the best way to build a startup? Bootstrap it, raise little or no VC funding, and (ideally) sell it for hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars, according to two venture capitalists.
That’s what they did at least. Andrew Farquharson, now the managing director of InCube Ventures in San Jose, CA, was the chief operating officer of Almeda, CA-based Operon Technologies when it sold to European nucleic acid company Qiagen in an all-stock deal worth around $110 million in 2000. Farquharson and his co-founders tried, but failed, to raise venture funding and instead were able to bootstrap.
