> Bootstrapping, and small budgets, force discipline.

This is only true in the evolutionary sense -- Example: "parachuting forces people to be good at checking their gear."

Telling someone that they are going to jump out of a plane won't magically give them a skill like meticulousness.

It’s a skill like any other, and requires study and practice. There is a reason why half of pilot training is checklists and drilling procedures until they are permanently encoded into your muscle memory.

Right. But I often see people ask "how can I learn to X" and get advice like "Go do Y. It will force you to X". But jumping into to the situation unprepared is not how pilots learn skill X. They learn it through particular methods of study and practice.

Yeah, true. Frugality is a nice thing to have learned. And I agree, you don't learn it by bootstrapping your company. Rather your company will likely go bankrupt if you didn't learn it before.

If you have the basics already, so, bootstrapping forces you to build up that. No guarantees, so.