Extreme Business

The ICISLT technical program is based on a belief that radical changes in the technology are needed in order to achieve the desired levels of performance.

Similarly, the Extreme Business philosophy is based on a belief that radical changes are needed in the way new companies are started, grown and managed.  Aspects of this new business philosophy are referred to as Extreme Entrepreneurship and Extreme Venture Capital or Bootstrap Capital.

What is wrong with venture capital?  When it is successful, conventional venture capital works extremely well and can make great fortunes.  However, the odds of success for the average would-be entrepreneur seeking venture capital are very low.  If there were no alternative, then budding entrepreneurs would just have to accept that they need to bet several years of their lives for a chance at a lottery ticket.  However, Extreme Entrepreneurship provides an alternative that gives up or postpones some of the lottery-winning size-rewards in exchange for maximizing the probability of at least a moderate success.

The conventional venture capital system also does only moderately well for the average institutional or angel investor.  Although a small fraction of investments do spectacularly well, the average return on investment is severely limited by the low success rate.  The methodologies that produce the low success rate result from strong structural constraints in conventional venture capital and hence are inherent in the system.  Bootstrap Capital makes radical changes in this structure in order to dramatically increase the average return on investment.