> If you don't have users, you don't have a company. Right. But it's tough to find any such statement on the Web site of a seed or series A VC. If they want

> If you don't have users, you don't have a company. Right. But it's tough to find any such statement on the Web site of a seed or series A VC. If they want me to have users, then they want me to have revenue. For that I need to get my first server built, running, and live on the Internet. And once I have that, I can just get the publicity and mostly otherwise see if people like the site without any equity funding. If the users do like the site and the usage grows, by the time that first server is fully busy, I will have ballpark $200,000 a month in revenue with less than 1% of that as expenses and 99+% of it as pre-tax earnings. Then since I'm a solo founder and 100% owner, why should I consider equity funding? Or, by the time they want to write me a check, I won't need it. > Or your $10bn/year metric is non-sense. Not at all. Planning is important, and that's how the planning works out. Sure, there is the assumption that people like the site. But the site itself is not much of a question since the software is essentially ready for quite serious production. If the VCs want to wait until the $10 billion is much easier to see, fine for them. Then they can offer to write me a series A check for $5 million for 1/3rd of my company? Gee, thanks, guys, your $5 million is about 5 hours of my revenue, nearly all of which is pre-tax earnings. > I see 0 ads per session because I use an ad blocker. If that gets to be a problem, then I will send the ads from my server and not have my Web pages get the ads from ad servers; besides part of my work is some unique and especially effective ad targeting where it will be easier for me just to send the ads from my server farm; ad blockers will, then, have to tell the difference between Web page images that are ads and ones that are content, both coming from the same domain name. Lot's of luck, there, guys! > What exactly is the pressing problem you're solving? I told the VCs. None of them gave a sh_t. My intention here is not to pitch VCs. Instead, I'm just trying to give other entrepreneurs the benefit of the painful, wasteful lessons I learned: In shortest terms, just pick a project you can do from your own checkbook, build that business, wait for the VCs to call you, and, then, see if you are still willing to accept their check. Likely you won't be.