I am in Madrid, Spain this week with a group of MBA students on a one week intensive study abroad.
Yesterday we visited an impressive company, Deimos Space, headquartered here in Madrid.
The founders were able to build a high growth company that launched their own satellite into space using only self-funding of $250K from the founders. An amazing story of what bootstrapping and building the right team can accomplish.
They started, grew to a global presence in the space market, and exited their venture all within a ten year period.
Most of the founders are still with the company helping to take the core technologies they developed in Deimos into other markets and other applications. There is a great description of how far they have taken their business model on their website.