On bootstrapping...
After the inventory sold, it was a matter of repeating the process. “You take all the money you make and buy more inventory with it,” Seidle says. “You continue to do this until either you have enough inventory to cover the number of incoming orders or you want to eat. I think it was more than 3 years before I was able to buy a new winter jacket. A growing, bootstrapped business is a cash devouring machine.”
On hiring good people...
“I hired any friend I could talk into working at SparkFun. Soon, we were asking our friends if they had friends, or siblings, or anyone they knew that would want to work at SparkFun. It seems silly to say, but of course they recommended people they wanted to work with. If you start with good people, they tend to multiply."