That's the trap many have gotten into. They raised to keep up with the Joneses, but if you raise it now you have to spend it. Now your baseline is higher and if

That's the trap many have gotten into. They raised to keep up with the Joneses, but if you raise it now you have to spend it. Now your baseline is higher and if your growth is not utterly insane or if you can't monetize it quickly enough and have to raise again, you are now potentially toast. It's infinitely easier to raise spending than cut it. The latter involves morale crushing things like layoffs and telegraphs an outward appearance of failure that drives off customers and future hires. Startups that have avoided this trap or who have a model that converts into revenue more easily than "get users and pray" might be fine, but I think a lot of unicorns and want to be unicorns with bricks strapped to the accelerator are about to be turned into glue. But unicorn glue is great. It's sparkly and can bond any surface. :) Edit: of course the wildcard here is the question of how economically incestuous the startup world is this time. That's what made the landing so hard in 2001. We know there are some startups that mostly serve startups, but nobody knows the percentages.