> founders who know they have a big opportunity Firstly, that kind of founder/opportunity is exceedingly rare. It may as well not exist for purpose of discussi

> founders who know they have a big opportunity Firstly, that kind of founder/opportunity is exceedingly rare. It may as well not exist for purpose of discussion. Ideas are literally worthless. You become successful via execution and execution at scale (unicorn scale) requires many moving parts with many people. That means there's no sure bets at the early rounds. There's not a specific formula that "works" so it's all subjective and VC groupthink. VC "works" only because they take high risk with limited downside via all the things Toptal is complaining about. Without those onerous terms, there would be no VC (as we know it) and it would be an order of magnitude or 2 harder to get funded.