bootstrapped
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Taylor Sloane and the art of closing the chat window
The HelpDocs co-founder likes getting the details right, down to the dissolved solids in a cup of coffee. Building a software company has also taught them when to stop, listen, and change the recipe.
Audrey McLoghlin and the strange power of one good shirt
She built Frank & Eileen around a single silhouette and kept the company in her own hands. Now Audrey McLoghlin wants more women to have the knowledge and freedom to build businesses of their own.
Yaakov Karda and the business hiding in the help desk
His custom-jeans company closed. The customer-service experience survived. With Chatra, Yaakov Karda turned an everyday skill into a business people already knew they needed.
Thomas Rivas
Thomas Rivas is the founder and CEO of Vendoo, a software platform that helps online resellers list and manage inventory across marketplaces like eBay, Poshmark, Etsy, Mercari and Facebook. He started selling online as a high schooler in 2007, kept selling through college at the University of Maryland, and turned the tedium of posting the same item to a dozen sites into a company that went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Vendoo has grown to roughly 50-60 employees, reached profitability, and has been used to create tens of millions of listings.
Artur Stepaniak
Artur Stepaniak is the co-founder and CEO of Tagvenue, a London-based online marketplace for booking event venues. He and university friend Maksim Kondratjuks started the company in March 2015 after struggling to find spaces for events, and grew it - largely by word of mouth - into one of the world's leading venue-hire platforms, now covering six countries and used by more than a million event planners each month. Before startups, Stepaniak spent his early career as a derivatives and proprietary trader.
Ganesh Shankar
Ganesh Shankar is the co-founder and CEO of Responsive (formerly RFPIO), a strategic response management platform that helps companies answer RFPs, security questionnaires, and due diligence requests faster. He started the company in 2015 with two colleagues after growing frustrated that responding to proposals ate up nearly a third of his time as a product manager. Under his leadership the company grew to more than 550 employees and 2,000+ customers, including dozens of Fortune 100 firms, while raising only about $27 million.
Nithish Sairam
Nithish Sairam is the co-founder and CEO of Illumine-i, a solar and power-engineering design firm he built after stints at Tesla and NextEra Energy. Under his leadership the bootstrapped firm expanded from a five-person team to roughly 240 engineers across offices in Fremont, Austin, and Chennai, and has been described as the largest independent digital design engineering firm in the residential PV solar sector.
Teddy Chan
Teddy Chan is the CEO and co-founder of AfterShip, the shipment-tracking and post-purchase platform he started in 2012 after building a package-tracking script for his own online toy store cut customer emails by more than half. A self-described software engineer who says he wants to write code forever, Chan grew AfterShip from a Startup Weekend Hong Kong hackathon win into a company handling billions of shipments a year for tens of thousands of merchants, profitable long before Tiger Global led a $66M Series B in 2021 that valued it above $1 billion.
Ahmed Khattak
Ahmed Khattak is the founder and CEO of US Mobile, the only American carrier built natively on the public cloud that lets customers ride and switch between all three major networks (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile) on demand. A Pakistani immigrant who landed on an F1 student visa, he spent a decade clawing US Mobile to $100M in annual recurring revenue, then doubled it to $200M in nine months. Before that he co-founded GSM Nation, a $130M unlocked-phone marketplace that taught him how the carriers really make money.
Brian de Haaff
Brian de Haaff is the co-founder and CEO of Aha!, the world's #1 product development software, which he built past $100 million in annual recurring revenue without taking a dollar of venture capital. Fully remote and profitable from the start, Aha! now serves more than a million product builders. A three-time software CEO, de Haaff is the author of Lovability and the originator of ideas like the Minimum Lovable Product and The Responsive Method. He writes prolifically for an audience of hundreds of thousands, arguing that great companies chase value, not valuation.
Jim Williams
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
Julie Nguyen
Julie Nguyen is the CEO and co-founder of Methodology, a Bay Area premium meal-delivery service that ships chef-cooked, ingredient-strict meals nationwide in reusable glass jars. A Stanford economics grad who jumped from J.P. Morgan to Lumosity to founder life, she bootstrapped the company in 2015 by emptying her 401(k) and has grown it to eight-figure annual revenue.
Kim Getgen
Kim Getgen is the founder and CEO of InnovationForce, an AI-powered innovation management platform born in Durham, North Carolina. She bootstrapped the company by moving in with her parents and selling her car, then watched it land on Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Workplace Solutions list and bring 165+ utilities onto a single collaboration platform. Named one of Inc.'s Top 500 Female Founders of 2025, she has spent two-plus decades shoving legacy industries (energy, cybersecurity) toward the future before the future arrives without them.
Allen Hao
Allen Hao is the founder and CEO of CL Global Academy, an international education company he co-founded in 2009 with Katrina Hao after the two met in Cambridge. From offices in the UK, Shanghai, and the US, the academy runs its 'OxCam Programmes' - short, project-based academic courses taught in Cambridge colleges by University-affiliated faculty. Hao has called himself an entrepreneur since age 16 and built the company without external funding into a profitable business serving over 1,500 students a year, with a claimed 24,000-plus alumni. Internally he goes by the title 'Chief Student-Centered Officer.' Born in Shanghai and splitting time between Cambridge and Madison, Wisconsin, he completed a Master's at the University of Cambridge from 2023 to 2025.
Ethan Aaron
Ethan Aaron is the founder and CEO of Portable, a New York based ETL/ELT company that builds the data connectors nobody else wants to build. Where the rest of the data-pipeline industry chases the same handful of popular sources, Portable went after the long tail - thousands of niche, bespoke business applications - with no-code connectors and flat, no-volume pricing. A Penn-trained mechanical engineer and Wharton economist who passed through Goldman Sachs and LiveRamp before founding the company, Aaron is one of the data world's most prolific public voices, posting daily on LinkedIn and pushing a blunt thesis: data teams exist to make money, not to collect tools.
Israel L'Heureux
Israel L'Heureux is the founder and CEO of Touchpoint Restaurant Solutions (touchpoint.io), a bootstrapped Palo Alto company that unifies the messy technology stacks of large quick-service restaurant chains under one platform built around OmniFusion and OmniLoyalty. Before restaurants, he co-founded Redline Networks, a high-performance application-acceleration company acquired by Juniper Networks in 2005 for roughly $132 million. A Stanford-trained product design engineer, he has moved from kicking off BMW's X5 program to building load balancers used by hundreds of enterprises to figuring out why a drive-thru line moves slowly.
Jonathan Regev
Jonathan Regev is the co-founder and CEO of The Farmer's Dog, the fresh, human-grade dog food company he started in 2015 with Brett Podolsky after the two met on a Birthright trip to Israel. A former Bain consultant and Rocket Internet entrepreneur-in-residence, Regev spent over a year planning the business before spending a dollar on infrastructure, building a subscription supply chain that ships pre-portioned, vet-formulated meals direct to dogs' doors. Under his leadership the company crossed more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, turned profitable, and won USA Today's Ad Meter with its 2023 Super Bowl debut.
Rashad Hossain
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Will Nitze
Will Nitze is the founder and CEO of IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition brand he built from a Kickstarter campaign into a nine-figure CPG company selling plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffee in more than 10,000 retail doors. A Harvard psychology and neuroscience graduate who once sold software to oil-and-gas companies, he formulated his first products with no food-science background, scaled IQBAR past 100 million bars sold, and now hosts the founder podcast Eating Glass.
Curtis Herbert
Curtis Herbert is an independent iOS developer and the solo founder behind Slopes, the Apple Design Award-winning app skiers and snowboarders use to track their days on the mountain. He spent nine years growing it from a $10,600 side project into a million-dollar business, documenting every revenue chart and hard lesson in public through his Slopes Diaries and Slopes Dev newsletter. He runs Breakpoint Studio out of Boulder, Colorado, and treats indie app development like a craft, taking cues from web businesses rather than other apps.
Justin Welsh
Justin Welsh is a writer and solopreneur who turned a 2019 burnout into one of the internet's most-studied one-person businesses. After scaling SaaS sales teams to nine figures, he walked away, moved to the Catskills, and started writing online daily. His business - powered by The Saturday Solopreneur newsletter, the LinkedIn Operating System, and a stack of self-serve digital products - has crossed roughly $10M+ in cumulative revenue at an ~89% margin with zero employees and zero ads.
Alex Hormozi
Alex Hormozi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, investor, and author who built and exited seven companies without outside capital before founding Acquisition.com, a holding company with 16+ portfolio businesses generating $200M+ in annual revenue. His $100M book series has sold over 5 million copies, including $100M Money Models which broke the Guinness World Record for fastest-selling non-fiction book in August 2025. He co-runs Acquisition.com with his wife and CEO Leila Hormozi and is a co-owner of Skool.com.
Adrian Ridner
Adrian Ridner is the CEO and Co-Founder of Study.com, one of the world's most visited online education platforms serving 34+ million monthly users. An Argentine-Jewish immigrant who navigated multiple countries before settling in California, Ridner built Study.com from a bootstrapped startup in 2002 into a 4,100-person company offering 20,000+ micro-video lessons and 200+ transferable college courses. His Working Scholars program has saved graduates $20 million in tuition and is particularly focused on first-generation college students and students of color. Ridner is a recipient of the ASU+GSV 2022 Innovator of Color Award and Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40.
Ben Ho
Ben Ho is the Singapore-based founder of Hex (hex.sg), a web design and development studio, and the creator of Sendy - a widely-used self-hosted email newsletter application powered by Amazon SES. A self-taught designer and programmer, Ben co-founded Hex with Melly Fong in 2007, building websites and web applications for major brands like Sony, Nokia, Levi's, Changi Airport, and Tiger Beer. His best-known product, Sendy, launched in August 2012 and transformed the email marketing economics for thousands of businesses by offering a one-time $69 fee to send newsletters at a fraction of the cost of platforms like Campaign Monitor - roughly $1 versus $150 per 10,000 emails via Amazon SES.
Darwin Thangappan
Darwin Thangappan is the CEO and founder of ASIR Technologies, a bootstrapped enterprise technology company headquartered in Milpitas, California, with development operations in Bangalore, India. A mechanical engineering graduate turned software entrepreneur, Darwin spent nine years at Oracle building and managing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne before launching ASIR Technologies in 2014. Under his leadership, the company has grown to 75+ employees and developed ACRA Suite, a 100% no-code automation platform that slashes regression testing time by 60% across JD Edwards, Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP, and Salesforce environments. Honored by Marquis Who's Who in 2025 for excellence in technology and product development, Darwin also holds a U.S. patent for computer user interface technology.
Ken Kopilevich
Ken Kopilevich is the Co-Founder and CEO of NEKLO LLC, a bootstrapped custom software development firm he built from a small startup in 2008-2009 into a 200-person global operation with $15.9M in annual revenue and a 5.0 Clutch rating. Working from Novato, California, he oversees a company that spans FinTech, eCommerce, and Healthcare software, with development centers in Eastern Europe. A dual-degree engineer with an MS from UC Berkeley and an MS from Riga Polytechnic University, Ken spent years at companies like AiBUY and Connected Life before channeling that experience into NEKLO, which has completed 450+ projects and retains 85% of its clients year over year.
Rebecca Shostak
Rebecca Shostak is the co-founder and CEO of Flodesk, a design-first email marketing platform that reached $36 million in annual recurring revenue without a single dollar of outside funding. A Silicon Valley native who taught herself Photoshop at 10, designed merchandise for Rihanna and Linkin Park, and built a company that Y Combinator rejected - then outgrew - Shostak turned a template shop frustration into a platform serving over 100,000 small businesses worldwide. Now steering Flodesk into AI, she spent five months in Vietnam with her engineering team building proprietary technology and filing seven patents.
Edwin Chen
Edwin Chen is the Founder & CEO of Surge AI, the AI data infrastructure company that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon for model training and evaluation. A former ML scientist at Google, Twitter, Dropbox, and Facebook, Chen bootstrapped Surge AI from his San Francisco apartment in 2020 to over $1.2 billion in annual revenue with fewer than 110 employees - no venture capital, no sales team. TIME named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025, and Forbes put him on the 400 list as one of the youngest billionaires. Surge's platform powers RLHF, supervised fine-tuning, and custom evaluations for the world's leading AI labs.
Sunil Patro
Sunil Patro is the Founder and CEO of Signeasy, the electronic signature and contract management platform he built after a frustrating afternoon hunting for a fax machine in Riviera Maya, Mexico in 2009. He bootstrapped the company for over a decade, coded the first version from hostels across Central and South America, and grew it to 10 million users across 180+ countries before taking any outside funding. A former Microsoft software engineer and IIT Kharagpur graduate, Patro has made a career out of making complex workflows embarrassingly simple.
Grey Baker
Grey Baker is a Cambridge-educated mathematician turned software entrepreneur best known for bootstrapping Dependabot to $14k MRR before selling it to GitHub in 2019, then growing GitHub Advanced Security to $140M ARR. A former McKinsey consultant who taught himself to code in six months, cycled 30,000km around the world between startups, and co-founded YC S23 company Pincites (AI contract negotiation, acquired by Filevine in 2025), he now serves as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator.