I've seen a lot of this as well. And the term "dumb money" is right-- there are two causes of startup death in my experience. The first being fights between t

I've seen a lot of this as well. And the term "dumb money" is right-- there are two causes of startup death in my experience. The first being fights between the founders paralyzing progress. The second being VCs forcing the company to ignore profitalble lines of business or customer traction and chase the VC's favorite fad of the day. But, this is also a perversion of the meaning of the word "startup". A lot of the BS aquihires-in-waiting in the Bay Area are not startps either. Somehow getting dumb money and being faux "scalable" has become what "a startup" is, with everything else (That is real busiensses, often scalable themselves) termed a "lifestyle business." A one man SaaS business is scalable if the target market is large enough, and even if it is a nich, PG has advised people to conquer a niche and then move to adjacent markets. So, if patio11 keeps his business at the size that he can run it by himself, that's fine, that's a choice, but I disagree with the idea that there's some magical "scalability" that those who live in the Bay Area and get funded by VCs have, compared to living in Japan and not taking investment. When you have no engineering background and your primary skill is BS, then its really easy to morph your "business" into whatever investors want and get that dumb money. But if you really want to build a business- then follow Running Lean, Steve Blank, and build that business. Chasing investor money seems to be a waste of time-- Investors would rather fund these hipsters than Viaweb.