> It is ten times the median savings an american family has

The median American family is not trying to start a business.

Also: if you can't manage your own funds and save please don't start a company, it will most likely not work and create misery for yourself and others.

> Once again I am not diminishing his accomplishments. I started my own company with the same amount of money but never claimed to have "bootstrapped"it.

Well, that's a problem of definition more than anything else. If you want to use the term bootstrapping as starting with nothing that's fine by me but I do note that even the word assumes the presence of boots and straps.

The key question is if the money was yours or not. If it wasn't then you weren't bootstrapping.

> We on HN live in a bubble that amazes me.

No, you choose to use terms in ways that are different from the rest of us. That's not a bubble, that's a terms issue. This can make communication hard.

> I know first hand how much it costs to start a company and how hard it is to raise a 1M€ (I heard it is as hard as raising 10M$ in the valley, but never tried to raise in the US so take that with a grain of salt!).

That depends. There is a lot of 'stupid money' floating around.

Besides, raising money is explicitly not part of bootstrapping.

> I also know it is much, much harder to get your first 1M€ of revenue.

Yes, that's true.

> Like one of my business angel once told me "il nest de bon argent que celui du client": the only good kind of money is the customer's.

Yes, that's good advice, but it comes from an investor.

You seem to misunderstand what the word "bootstrapped" means and I don't mean disrespect. Just because he put $55K of his own money does not make it any less bootstrapped. In fact, that is the definition of bootstrapped. He used his own money. He did it fulltime. You seem to have this notion that to bootstrap a business, you have to start from $0 or perhaps a very small amount.

DISCLAIMER: I bootstrapped a business with similar amount to his but nowhere near his level of success (embarassing but happy with what I have done so far in 2.5 years). We are a much smaller team though so yes, I have not spent too much on growth yet.

Just a quick definition: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bootstrap.asp

> Bootstrap is a situation in which an entrepreneur starts a company with little capital. An individual is said to be boot strapping when he or she attempts to found and build a company from personal finances or from the operating revenues of the new company.