The last thing I put a lot of time into building, I took on a prominent VC as a business partner. That was a ~7 year partnership. Overall it was a good experien

The last thing I put a lot of time into building, I took on a prominent VC as a business partner. That was a ~7 year partnership. Overall it was a good experience and yet I still find myself not wanting to do it any longer (give up equity to VCs). When your partner is a billionaire you find it's a lot more challenging to do things exactly the way you want to, to live by whatever your vision for the thing is, and to tell said billionaire no if there's a disagreement. It's not that you can't per se, it's that there is definitely additional relationship and operational risk to the context, additional calculation. It's very common for big investors to have big egos and big opinions. Pleasing investors becomes a thinking mistake problem that you have to manage. That's a mental cost to keep at bay and it gets old/tiring. The same is true whether the VC is prominent or just your average SV VC, and it persists whether it's a small number of investors or a lot of investors you're dealing with. Besides the obvious that venture capital isn't always right for every business or every business stage, sometimes it's never right for certain organizations. I'm working on a social network that will operate either as a public benefit corporation or non-profit org. There's no place for outside investors in there. Even if you eventually return to dealing with investors, do yourself a favor and build without them from time to time, at least for extended periods of time; it's refreshing to the soul if building things is what you really like doing.