Main theme: The VCs again are not looking carefully at the plans of the company and, instead, are focused just on current traction and maybe the growth rate

Main theme: The VCs again are not looking carefully at the plans of the company and, instead, are focused just on current traction and maybe the growth rate of that traction. So, the VCs are looking at essentially just accounting measures. That's like betting on race cars without looking at the car engineering. Problem: Using just traction and its rate of growth is a poor way to evaluate the real future of the company. Here's some of how: That approach ignores (A) the size of the market and its growth rate, (B) the core technology and is it defensible or, instead, easy to duplicate or equal, (C) the status of would be competition, (D) the scalability of the technology, (E) the margins once have reached some significant scale, etc. The VCs look like they would really like a drag race car that from a standing start just went 0-100 MPH in 2.5 seconds but 500 feet ahead is headed off a cliff, in another 1/2 second will have the rear tires explode, the supercharger belt fail, or already has the engine at 8000 RPM and in 1/2 second at 10,000 RPM the engine will explode. Why Do VCs Do This: As the OP explains, the VCs have to report back to their LPs quite frequently, and the LPs are looking only for simplistic measures, e.g., from something close to traditional accounting, e.g., would ignore anything about the engineering of a race car. Apparently the VCs and LPs would prefer a lemonade stand that opened just before July 4th and on July 5th can show good traction and fantastic rate of growth in traction. For a safe, effective, cheap one pill that taken once can cure any cancer now in Phase III trials, the information technology VCs would say "No traction" and f'get about it. So, the VCs want an early pop easy to see and measure in simplistic terms. Okay, that can become a game. So, delay all reports of progress. When have accumulated some nice progress in traction, in January say that will have rapid growth starting in March and will have a report on April 1st. Do that, and have the April 1st report look really good on traction and its rate of growth. Then let the VCs report this fantastic exploding success back to the LPs. Information technology VCs just flatly refuse to evaluate projects based on the real internals and, instead, pay attention only to simplistic, visible, external measures. That's foolish. Entrepreneurs beware: Reporting to a BoD of fools is no fun.