Five Entrepreneurs Who Bootstrapped Their Startups With A Paycheck

Bootstrapping your startup while holding onto a full-time job is plenty viable. We have numerous examples of very successful companies that were built in this mode.

Here are five entrepreneurs whose stories will give you lots of inspiration:

1. Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks: Girish has since built one of the leaders in cloud-based healthcare IT solutions including practice management, EMR, etc. The company forecasts over $300 million in revenue in 2014. Read my February 2010 Entrepreneur Journeys interview with him here. Also, a recent follow-up interview is here.

2. Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil of DataStax: This is an interesting story of how an open source software company built around Cassandra was incubated by Rackspace and subsequently raised $189.7 million in funding from top VCs. The latest round of funding (Series E) values them at $830 million. Founded by engineers Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, this interview traces the corporate incubation process they experienced.

3. Itai Sadan of Dudamobile: Itai bootstrapped a cloud-based site mobilization company while working at SAP. This interview describes how they got to millions of customers.

4. Phanindra Sama of RedBus: Many startup eco-systems have very little seed financing. India, while the situation is improving now, was very immature when Phani started RedBus while working at Texas Instruments. The company has since had a substantial exit. This interview illustrates their journey.

5. Miguel Valdes-Faura of BonitaSoft: Bootstrapped with a paycheck in France, Bonisoft has since moved to San Francisco, and has built a sizable business. More here.

The trend is clear and pervasive: You can use your paycheck to bootstrap your business.