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If you put your life on hold for a year, build that side project, then go pitching to VCs with your MVP and 100 users - you'll be negotiating same terms and see

• derefr 11y ago
  To put it another way, the garage weekends step only makes sense if you're never planning on taking investment in the first place. Bootstrapping requires garage weekends (or enough of a nest-egg that engineer-you can work full-time for visionary-you.) The whole point of venture capital is to skip that part. Importantly, a startup with enough sweat put into it that it's now executing on a business model instead of searching for a viable business model is no longer a startup; and if that's the only thing a VC is funding, then that person is not actually a VC, but rather a private-equity investor. (And you could go further, and point out that the whole concept of "private equity" was just for the sake of startups with market risk; and that, having validated their market and eliminated such risk, companies should—according to the spirit of the law—immediately do their IPO. These "venture capitalists"—really just plain-old "capitalists" at this point—would then be forced to compete with every other schlub who wants a piece of the company.