Startups Rejecting Venture Capital

My current startup has taken VC funds. Never again. What a nightmare.

I think TFA did a better job with that than I ever could.

Regardless, my short summary is that VCs, in my experience, are the worst of people who don't give a shit about you or your team, and just want to see more and more money. I don't want to deal with or be involved with people like that.

Edit: Also I should note, many of our VCs pitched themselves as 'angel' and 'impact' investors. So, while I didn't expect them to just hand us free money, I also didn't expect quite the level of cut-throat behavior we've seen.

It's a testament to the propaganda that VCs set up in the last ~20 years that this is even a newsworthy article. Since the first dotcom boom, basically, the popular idea of a startup has been synonymous with taking venture capital and then building your business based on making the VC firm fabulously wealthy in the relatively near term. Of course there are a million other ways to build a successful business, but for a while this was the predominant one in the startup world. I'm glad it's changing.

VCs win if enough of their bets make it big enough to offset the ones that go under. Naturally the big hits are few and the ones that fail are numerous. That means the big hits need to be huge and the failures need to have a certain cap. The latter also means you can't run a company for 10 years in slowmo until they get profitable. And the big hits need to be huge which means they need to take over a nice chunk of a market which you can only do with good funding and moving faster than everyone else.

VCs were able to control the startups they invested in to a pretty big degree.

What does that mean for founders? It means that you are putting all your eggs into one basket. A founder does not found 20 startups at the same time in the hope that one succeeds. A founder puts his effort usually into only one. So founders take a larger risk than VCs. They make it big or go bust. And the vast majority goes bust when running in supercharged mode.

What does that mean for startup employees? Well, they got the worst of all worlds. High risk and little to no upside. Their eggs are also in one basket as they work for only one company AND they don't have the huge upsides that VCs and founders have.

The whole game favors only VCs and founders who like big bets. But for the vast majority of people (which includes employees), the VC game is not a great game to play.

One thing that not many people talk about: there's an oversupply of VC funds spawned by the technological waves of the 90s (internet), 2000s (mobile) and everything in between. Today there isn't a clear wave, yet those funds need to deploy capital. Now there are too many funds pursuing not enough VC-worthy opportunities. The VC bubble will pop sooner or later.