When I hear about a raise, especially this large, my initial thoughts are, "great! they must be doing something right", then I remember all those startups that

When I hear about a raise, especially this large, my initial thoughts are, "great! they must be doing something right", then I remember all those startups that raised mega rounds and ended up selling me as a customer down the river, either by the way of selling to someone like Google and writing an "amazing journey" blog post or just lock me in and jack up prices (I'm looking at you Customer.io). That's why I always look for profitable companies that have built a business around solid foundations rather than raising external capital in round B, C, D all the way to Z. If you want to see how those companies *really* were doing, look at their stock prices after they go public. Very few go up or even stay flat. Most of them crash right after the stock handcuffs come off and the investors have passed the bucket to the general public. I even have an anti-portfolio of public companies with investors who wouldn't shut up for a minute about how amazing they are doing, when they were private companies. All of them have done considerably worse than the market average or any basket of tech companies, even excluding the big five.