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> Companies without VC funding also fail. Companies without VC funding also don't have to deal with investors pushing to get a big return at the expense of eve
by awj 15y ago
> Companies without VC funding also fail.
Companies without VC funding also don't have to deal with investors pushing to get a big return at the expense of every other part of their business. Maybe not all VCs do this - I suspect that's the reason your responses to this string of 37signals posts seem defensive - but a significant portion of them do.
> Instead of simply assuming that one of two equally plausible alternatives is true, it would be useful if David tried looking at the world and trying to figure out which is actually true.
Honestly, I think you're both painting with a wide brush. He's lumping all VCs together as pump-and-dump investors and you're taking his criticism of that business model as "no one should take VC money."
This is a tough topic, which makes the vague language at play here all the more frustrating. I'm not entirely convinced you two are actually talking about the same things.
While you're right that VC funding (and all of the other resources) can be valuable assets, I've had the end-user experiences he cites often enough to get suspicious any time I see someone taking it.
- dgreensp 15y agoThe source of the vagueness is that David doesn't make any real claims to correlation, let alone causation, between VC funding and the company-level problems he lists -- he just says VC-backed companies might do this, VC-backed companies might do that. For example, The Talent Acquisition -- if anything, raising VC means you probably won't be a talent acquisition, right? His excuse for including this problem is that your VCs will be the ones to blab to Google about how great you are, at which point they acquire you and shut you down. Huh?
- seclorum 15y agoCompanies that don't pay their bills, fail. A VC is only needed as a big lump of cash when that rule is broken very early on. Any group can focus on generating profit from their ability to work well together and deliver to the world something that is truly needed and wanted. A group that pays its bills forward and productively pushes its ability to generate revenues, no matter if consisting of two people or many, many more, has to manage this fact. VC as an 'injection combustible' is definitely of value in markets, but I propose that the group dynamic as defined by the individuals actively contributing to the survival of the company is too often over-managed before this reality sinks in. An executive team who have worked together to do big things in the past is really, sort of, a step above 'need outside help or else we are toast' levels of competence.