> The right people are too busy working to be chasing down investors 24/7. Speaking from experience, I feel like there are a great many smaller-companies with

> The right people are too busy working to be chasing down investors 24/7. Speaking from experience, I feel like there are a great many smaller-companies with successful, profitable products that are just fine with a 40hr/week team of 7 people clearing around a million USD/year in income. It's not too hard to find them but what incentive could possibly make it work out for at least more than the key stakeholders, say 2 or 3 in this company? I would never stay put in an aqui-hire and 6 weeks severance or whatever is a shit deal IMO. Maybe we've reach peak cynicism and investors just can't find the smartest people to invest in because the smartest know better are shying away? As an aside, It's funny how this phenomena seems to be observable in becoming President of the USA, I think. Too much of becoming president in the past ~60 years (I think back to Kennedy/Nixon debate) is based on a candidates EQ, persona, and even fundraising abilities, which effectively eliminates tons of highly-qualified potential candidates who may outright suck at those sort of things, but "count the beans" really nicely. I believe it was John Dickerson who went at length on this very topic somewhere in a his Whistlestop podcast.