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- Hacker News
- The bootstrapping-without-VC point tracks with what I keep hearing from people building small AI-adjacent tools on their own. A few have told me directly they never considered raising – not because they couldn't, but because the traction they needed was small enough that a few months of paying customers did the job faster than a pitch deck would have.
That might also explain part of the discrepancy in this thread: a count like this only captures what registers as a "startup" in the first place. If AI is mostly lowering the cost of getting to a working, revenue-generating product solo, a meaningful chunk of that activity may never show up in a founder database – it just looks like someone quietly running a small profitable thing.
Curious whether anyone here started something in Germany this year without going near a grant or VC process – and if so, whether that was deliberate or just never came up.
by alexbelyanin - They had one?by kbelder
- That's not even 1,5% of all companies founded annually.by jasonvorhe
- What do you think all those IT engineers who were made redundant in the last months are doing? Some of them might prefer founding a start-up to joblessness. It's not the first time that a job market crisis increases the rate of start-up registrations.by jstrebel
- Maybe more related to the possibility of boot strapping with random AI startups. German investors are pretty conservative.by ant6n
- Being Germany, that means it only takes six months to properly register a startup? :)by nottorp