Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long story short, nothing to do with your actual business or business model or innovative technology or hand-wavy "disruption" or large addressable market size or traction or any of the other things that VCs tell the plebs matter, when in reality they only matter if you don't have anything more valuable like the above. This is how companies raise ludicrous amounts of money without ever finding product-market fit, bec…
> nothing to do with your actual business or business model or innovative technology or hand-wavy "disruption" or large addressable market size or traction I would take out "traction" from this. If a company has strong traction (that looks sustainable) it will outweigh everything else.
It's hard to prove counter-examples of companies that have had significant traction but were unable to raise money, because, well they were unable to raise money. The only alternatives are those companies who have had large amounts of traction, were unable to raise money, but ended up being successful anyways by bootstrapping or finding some alternate method. But it's not generally / necessarily true that companies that have strong, sustainable traction will outweigh everything else because the counter-examples are just not obvious. Intuitively, I can imagine that there have indeed been companies that have had great / strong traction, but have no Ivy League management team, no VC connections, no real family strength, no past history of success, and none of the other things that were described above, and thus, despite their strong traction, they were unable to raise money.