If you are doing a webbased service, and your plan is to make billions do you really need outside capital? I think the answer for a lot of businesses might be

If you are doing a webbased service, and your plan is to make billions do you really need outside capital? I think the answer for a lot of businesses might be no. By now it is common knowledge that a webbased company can be started by a couple of good hackers in a few months - just look at some of the Y-combinator companies. So the next stage after building your product is marketing and growth. Common wisdom tells us that growth requires a lot of money - but I think this is often a fallacy extrapolated from a world ten years ago that was very different than todays. What do you need the money for? If you have a webservice your income goes up as you gain users (if it doesn't you might need to rethink your business model) so hardware costs can be paid for this way. Marketing is often a question of having a good product and being smart in your marketing - having a lot of money doesn't always help you. Look at how well pets.com did with all their marketing and contrast it to google that did no marketing at all but had a great product. Besides having investors is a timesink, and you will spend time that you could have spent marketing or making your product better on reports and financial statements for your investors. Chase customers instead of chasing investors, unless you are doing something that truly requires capital.