Bootstrapped Startups in the Digital Economy: Efficiency, Survival, and the Lean Advantage

We introduce the Bootstrap Efficiency Model (BEM), a composite metric operationalising lean-startup efficiency, and provide its first large-scale validation against mandatory administrative financial disclosures. Applied to the complete UK Companies House registry (5,696,442 records, cohort 2001–2010), we construct two parallel analytic samples: Track A (survival; N=222,025) and Track B (acquisition proxy; N=40,670). Using L2-regularised logistic regression, 5-fold cross-validation, and 1,000-iteration bootstrap confidence intervals, we confirm that bootstrapped firms exhibit higher BEM efficiency and survival probability (H1; r=0.636, d=0.703), a suppressor effect where bootstrapped status positively predicts acquisition-type outcomes once financing volume is controlled (H2; coefficient shift=+0.616), and an efficiency threshold discriminating survival rates by +25.8 pp (H3). Results are robust across seven cohort windows spanning 1998–2015. The complete open-source pipeline is available at github.com/SpiliosDimakopoulos/bem-companies-house.