Bootstrapping Your Business : Start and Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money is a new book by Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies and writer of a Thought Leader column over at SiliconValleyWatcher.

Greg’s contrarian suggestion is that you should strongly consider starting your new business without Venture Capital assistance. He points out that Dell, HP and Microsoft all began without VC funding. His own business followed the same path.

The sheer effort involved in raising money, and the complexity of contractual arrangements, deplete your time and energy which should be concentrated on selling value to customers. That income is the only thing that counts in any business, large or small.

Be realistic, he writes, support your idea, not another’s cash flow. Run your business, not an income stream for someone else. Excellent advice, no doubt, but can it be done?

Yes, and he can prove it : “At RightNow, we doubled our revenue and employees every 90 days for two years before we took any outside money, and even then the employees retained more than 75% ownership after raising $32m.”

Money reduces essential discipline. If you have the money, you’ll spend it, regardless of whether you have a clear idea of your business model or not. Moreover : “Raising VC money determines your exit strategy. You will either sell the business or take it public. What if you end up with a very profitable, modest sized business that you want to just run? That is no longer an option once you raise VC money.”

So raising money before you have developed your business model and proved its worth is putting the cart before the horse. It’s the worst time to raise money from a valuation perspective.

It’s never easy starting any business. Why then, says our author, shackle yourself at the outset? This is not a fashionable view, but it makes sense.