Fog Creek describes its own founding as self-funded

The workload

Two people, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, built Fog Creek Software starting in 2000 without an outside investor, according to Spolsky's own later account on his site: 'In 2000 I co-founded Fog Creek Software,' he writes in the author biography attached to his essays. The company's own historical timeline page lists 'Joel on Software' as its first output, dated 2000, followed a year later by the bug-tracking tool FogBugz. Building a company this way, two co-founders funding early development themselves rather than raising money first, replaces a pitch deck and investor updates with the daily work of shipping a first paid product before outside cash exists.

What the documents show

Spolsky's own 2006 essay describes himself, self-reported, as 'the CEO of Fog Creek Software, a bootstrapped software company in New York, NY.' The company's own about page, archived in 2018, corroborates the founding year and product order but frames the history promotionally, without naming a funding amount: it states only that Fog Creek made 'customers happy since the turn of the century' as 'an independent, privately-owned company.' Neither page states a dollar figure for how the company was funded in its first year, and no revenue or headcount number for 2000 or 2001 appears in either source, so none is repeated here.

The operating cost

None of the company's own pages states what it cost the two founders to build and sell the first products, the Joel on Software writing and the FogBugz tracker, before FogBugz revenue existed. The about page counts by product-launch year rather than by expense: 2000 for the company's writing, 2001 for FogBugz, 2007 for Stack Overflow, co-founded with Jeff Atwood, 2011 for Trello, and 2016 for Glitch. Establishing an actual early operating cost, office space, the founders' living expenses, hosting, is not attempted in either document and would require a separate financial record neither page provides.

The stop condition

Neither the essay nor the company's own history page names a point at which the founders would have stopped funding the business themselves and either sought investment or shut it down. The nearest related guidance is Spolsky's separate advice, in the same 2006 essay, that a new company should not proceed past its earliest stage without another person confirming the underlying idea has merit; whether that threshold was ever formally applied inside Fog Creek is not documented in either self-published source, so any specific stop condition offered here would be editorial rather than sourced.

• Is a claim of being 'bootstrapped' based on a stated funding source, or only on the absence of one being mentioned?
• What would a first-year expense record for a two-founder shop need to include before a comparison to Fog Creek is meaningful?
• Does the company's own product-launch timeline stand in for a funding history, or only resemble one?

The record here is two self-published pages, a founder's own biography and a company's own product timeline. Both agree on the founding year and the absence of outside investors at that point; neither documents the actual cost of getting there.