Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but would it have been possible to create products along the way that would have made enough money to have a longer or maybe e

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but would it have been possible to create products along the way that would have made enough money to have a longer or maybe even infinite runway? Would such an approach have flown with the VCs? I am thinking about something like creating an own ion source first, keep building and selling these and using the money to tackle the next problem. Then tackle the next problem. And so on. Two examples of different hard engineering problems being approached in different ways: Compare Blue Origin's and SpaceX' approach to developing reusable rockets. Blue Origin is financed by Mr. Bezos. If Bezos stopped that (certainly not intentionally but a bus factor of 1 is bad anyways), Blue Origin would be left with no sustainable business from what we can tell. I am convinced that in the worst case a defense contractor would happily buy in but for the company as a whole it might be over. SpaceX was developing reusable rockets by creating rockets (hard but not as hard as going directly to reusable rockets) first and selling services (that's even better than selling products) to customers to finance the development. They were even using already paid for rocket launches for their experimental landing attempts. That's a lot cheaper than having to pay multiple for a rocket just to see it blow up on landing (or reentry or sometime in between). The same could be said about Tesla, Waymo and self-driving. Waymo has to reach full self-driving (FSD) to start making money. If they fail, they company is dead or also needs to be sold. If Tesla fails to reach FSD? That would suck, they would have to pay back the customers who bought the FSD package early, maybe deal with a class-action lawsuit because of this and but they could carry on selling cars nevertheless.