This post is either written by someone with no skin in the game when it comes to the advice they’re giving (despite appearing to have swallowed a couple of Taleb books but retained little, oh the pointless irony) or who is massively overgeneralising a subset of reality that worked for them.
Please don’t follow their advice.
> The alternative is to forgo raising money and creating a sustainable business from the beginning, growing linearly with the number of people that give you money for your product.
This works only for insanely wealthy founders or trivially simple to implement businesses (and even then you’re going to need to be way richer than average). One of the great things about the rise in startups, accelerators, and VCs is that starting companies has become a career option for far more of the population.
The rest of the argument just degenerates from there:
No skin in the game: try telling that to a founder who’s taken a 50–80% pay cut and probably started off working for free to get their company funded, but who owns big chunk of the equity and can pay themselves properly if they get to product market fit and hit a growth curve.
Ruthless execution, faster path to growth etc. Nonsense! I’ve come across plenty of small startups or individual founders that carried on far too long after they should have admitted failure because of the sunk cost fallacy. Team keeps taking sacrifices - cut all costs, less pay, work for equity, etc. But while you’re small enough you can do this nearly indefinitely. Taking funding forces you to aim for something bigger and you’re either going to win, close down, pivot, or get acquired. Sure you can keep raising while there’s a probability of a big enough success at the end but the size of the potential and burden of evidence goes up with every new round and every increased valuation.