Well, agreed you get along without VC if you actually have a part-time job and which leaves you the necessary time to program on the side . It is also quite tru

Well, agreed you get along without VC if you actually have a part-time job and which leaves you the necessary time to program on the side . It is also quite true that hardware and stuff are quite cheap by now. Still, if you don't have any money and not a job then VC seems to be the only way on how to make a living and pay for all the expenses. There are lawyer fees for getting incorporated, trademark-fees, patent-fees and renting a scalable RoR server at JoyEnt costs also 125$ a month. We are now a team of three founders and work fulltime on our project. But programming is only half the things we have to do, we also have to think about the promotion of our product, things have to be designed, the userinterface gets tested a lot and we have to think about strategies how to make our service known. We will probably use GoogleAdWords, create a viral videospot etc. All these things cost money. And it would be really great to have an office where we could program instead of my 13 squaremeter room which leaves me nearly no privacy because when I go to bed someone is programming in my apartment and when I wake up someone else is already there. Therefore I think that VC still covers a quite basic need of a startup, even if RoR is used and the founders have read Getting Real. Founding a company still costs money, although admittedly less than a few years ago. VC-companies investing in webprojects are not dead, but will have to adapt to the needs of founders and start investing smaller sums.