One of the first lessons an avid outdoorsman taught me is that when you’re facing the unforeseen elements of nature, it isn’t smart to rely on outside help for survival. We sometimes forget that the same is true for business, particularly in light of the venture capital-fueled dot-com boom and rise of advanced Web-based (or Web 2.0) tools that are helping to redefine the concept of “bootstrapping,” or building a business without outside capital.

Today’s generation of business innovators are driven by bootstrapping’s own mantra – ideas that sell matter. As the world becomes smaller and flatter, many are using inexpensive Web-based tools (e.g. - Google AdSense, blogging, RSS) to help market their ideas and test the waters, before investing a tremendous amount of either time or capital into the new business.

Consider the example of 29-year-old Kevin Rose, founder of the popular citizen journalism Web site Digg.com, who achieved post-boom bootstrapping success when he came up with a new method to empower millions of Internet users and bloggers by encouraging them to gather and centralize global news.

Three years after Rose used $1,000 of his own money to start Digg, which allows users to submit and rank popular articles about everything from music to politics to technology, his dream is evolving into one of the most frequently visited Web sites in the U.S. – and there’s no sign that the “digging” frenzy is slowing down any time soon.

Only a few years ago, venture capital was a logical pursuit for any post-MBA graduate who had an idea and a business plan. But during the dot-com bust of the early-2000s, thousands of entrepreneurs learned the hard way that it takes much more than buy-in from VCs to turn a profit – the fundamental ingredient of a successful business.

Ask a group of Silicon Valley veterans to talk about their early mistakes and you’re likely to hear a boom-era story about a small, VC-funded start-up that failed because it was more focused on spending capital than finding a stable way to turn a profit.

I learned the hard way when I was brought in to help turn around a New York-based company during the dot-com bust. Although the founders had a good idea, they were better at raising money than taking the idea from the drawing room to the showroom. By the time I joined the company, they had worked their way through 10 different business models and over $20 million of venture and angel capital. Most of the money was spent on infrastructure, marketing and advertising.

Looking back on the experience, I can’t imagine it being much different from owning a fully-loaded luxury car without a steering wheel.

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