I've said it before and I'll say it again.  The surest path to a healthy economy is through innovation and entrepreneurship.  Apparently Sramana Mitra, technology entrepreneur and columnist for Forbes, agrees with me.  In her latest book, Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction, which, by the way, is self-published, she showcases 12 successful entrepreneurs who made it to the top by bootstrapping at the start. Bootstrapping is essentially begging, borrowing, and bartering to get your business launched. It's doing more with less.  You won't find the usual suspects in this book.  Instead, she highlights a bunch of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who aren't constantly in the press like Beatrice Tarka of Mobissimo, a travel search engine, and Wayne Krause of Hydro Green Energy.

Mitra also throws her political views into a short chapter she whimsically calls "Barack Obama's Finance Lesson."  Here she asserts that many of the entrepreneurs she interviewed would not have gotten their start without an investment by one of the so-called "rich."  According to Mitra, "You have to make and have money before investing in the start-up dreams of our next generation of entrepreneurs."  So, taxing the rich to fund the government's agenda is essentially shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. 

The book reads like an interview, which may be awkward for some, like me, who find it a bit jarring.  But the stories are great and the lessons important.  One of my favorite quotes came from Murli Thirumale who sold his company Net6 to Citrix for $50 million and then started over with another new company to take advantage of his newfound wisdom.  His lesson? "We found if we got into a bake-off, we won the taste test.  Everybody who tried our product wanted it.  All we had to do was get into the taste test."  Bottom line: find the quickest, cheapest way to get your product into the customer's hands and you'll likely make a sale.

If you want to be inspired and find creative ways to get started with less, check out Mitra's book and her weekly column in Forbes.