The Genius of Starting a Company Without Outside Capital

Do you have any good stories about worker collectives? I'm interested in them and am always looking for information beyond what is provided by a basic google search.

Unsurprisingly, at least to those who follow craft brewing, "contract brewing" is one of the ways to start a brewing business at relatively lower risk (with the other being "brew pubs"). (This is according to various books, such as "Brewing Up a Business" (by Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewery) and "Beer School" (by Steve Hindy and Tom Potter of Brooklyn Brewery), as well as conversations with contract brewers.)

To the "beer geeks", there's seemingly an ongoing debate whether a contract brewery is a "real" brewery. But that's another discussion...

It can work. As a young engineer I started a primarily-software business in the early 90's and was too independent and unsophisticated to even consider outside investment. Honestly I wouldn't have known where to start - there was no public internet yet. I did however bring in a trustworthy partner with a completely different set of innate skills to complement mine. Both of us worked hard, used credit cards when we needed to but had to make money all along the way, followed the demand to design our products, grew the business and finally sold it when the dot-com era was peaking. Even though we weren't really a dot-com, money was flowing freely then in many areas around it. I was old enough to remember the housing boom/bust of the S&L era and I was betting the dot-com era was unsustainable too. There is always luck involved to some extent and it was a white-knuckled ride but in hindsight the worst case outcome was corporate or personal bankruptcy and we were young and would have had plenty of time to recover. I know others who have similar stories.

I don't know how "genius" this is, but if you want to spend some money to "look more like a real startup" you are definitely going down the wrong path.