Bootstrap Entrepreneur: How Grit, Faith, and Help from a Chippewa Tribe Built a Technology Company

"Inspiring and heartfelt" -Grand Forks Herald

A fascinating history of America's rise to technological leadership, seen through the eyes of someone who helped make it happen.

Do you know which midwestern city was the first tech hub, decades before Silicon Valley?

Do you know why computer memory, back then, was made by hand?

In the early 1970s, John Miller bootstrapped a tech company on a remote Native American reservation in his home state North Dakota.

In the middle of a recession, out-of-control inflation, and nationwide political unrest amongst Indian American activists.

He started up with no capital. His only product was soon to be replaced by the silicon chip.

Thirty years later, Miller sold his company for 18 million dollars.

In Bootstrap Entrepreneur, you'll discover:

• The community spirit that defined post-war America
• Why business lessons from the 70s are as important today as they were back then
• How underserved communities can play a role in bringing back jobs from overseas
• What ethical leadership and a focus on quality can achieve
• Where the 20th-century tech revolution started (not in California!)

Bootstrap Entrepreneur is compelling and entertaining. If extraordinary achievements by ordinary people inspire you, if you enjoy exploring hidden histories, and if you believe in the American Spirit, then you'll love John Miller's memoir of midwestern ingenuity and entrepreneurship.

John "Tip" Miller began his career in St. Paul, Minnesota, at a time when the Twin Cities were the first Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the computer revolution. The company he worked for, UNIVAC, was already legendary as the maker of the world's first commercial computer, and the Twin Cities teemed with tech startups spinning off from UNIVAC. Miller eventually helped found one of them, Atron. A few years later, when Miller started his own company on the Turtle Mountain reservation in his home state of North Dakota, computer memory was still being made by hand, and Miller leveraged the dexterity and craftsmanship of members of the Chippewa tribe. Ignoring the many skeptics, who doubted the viability of a high-tech company in a remote rural area, he grew his company into a successful electronics manufacturing business. An inductee of the North Dakota Entrepreneur Hall of Fame, Miller lives in St. Paul. Bootstrap Entrepreneur is his first book.

Christina Schweighofer is an award-winning journalist and memoir ghostwriter in Los Angeles.