Earlier quoted context omitted.
To answer a few questions: One of my issues with this person is that while I do like his company, and respect him in a lot of ways, we think differently about how to move things forward. I'm much more of a "below the radar, live cheap and get something working" guy, whereas he's more along the lines of "VC funding or bust", without even having much of a prototype. That just sounds bad to me. Though I recognize that f…
I know several first time entrepreneurs from several years ago that "tested" waters in initial stages trying to raise VC money. And it's damn hard! So unless this guy has some inside connections and has been there, done that--I'd personally say it is not only a bad idea but potentially a huge waste of time--same thought I'm sure you must be having. If you can get going without any funding(which it appears you can) ST…
Possible, but it's also possible that he justs doesn't know that any other way is possible.
I came into an existing startup as the first technical cofounder. There had been a lot of previous design work, but no implementation. The plan had been to do a bunch of UI mockups, flesh out the design, write a business plan, and pitch it to a bunch of VCs. When one of them gave us money, we'd hire a bunch of programmers and implement the darn thing.
The first week after I joined, I started demoing. It was really crude at first - just a login screen in a barebones layout. (Heck, the product is still really crude - when we launch, it'll be yet another commodity CRUD-site, and it won't be until some months later that we'll have a useful differentiator.) But it was working code, and it got better every week.
The effect was pretty incredible. The cofounder who was all pitch-to-VCs-and-hire-developers ended up learning Dreamweaver and coming up with a kickass layout. And then he learned Flash and started out fleshing out large architectural areas, actually writing some Flash code. We applied to YCombinator, got turned down, and decided we're gonna go for it anyway.
Oftentimes, people just need to see that yes, this is possible, and that you can accomplish a significant amount on your own without waiting for a miracle to occur.
I'm a big fan of the "flywheel effect" mentioned in Jim Collins's books. It's basically "Start doing the right thing anyway, no matter how useless it appears. Keep doing it, no matter how useless it appears. People will eventually realize that you're going to succeed anyway, and start pitching in. Then the flywheel starts spinning faster." Many folks expect venture capital because they never hear about startups that succeeded without it; if you show them what's possible on your own, then you often get both the cofounder and the venture capital.