"But having a side job is distressful too." If people aren't willing to give you cash for equity, it's probably a bad idea for a company and you should switch

"But having a side job is distressful too." If people aren't willing to give you cash for equity, it's probably a bad idea for a company and you should switch projects. (It's unlikely that you're the one in 100,000 entrepreneur who has a brilliant idea others just can't see the brilliance of.) Otherwise I don't think there's much of a good argument for turning down equity financing for a high-risk venture. It just makes a lot of sense economically: your biggest asset as a poor entrepreneur is your time and effort, and you need some capital to make your project happen. Investors have a lot of capital, but only a finite amount of time/effort to do things with it. So it's a fair trade: you put in time/effort, and the investor puts in money. If you just finance everything with debt, you end up having to incur both downsides of losing time and money -- and the downside of losing $100k in capital is a lot worse for you than for the rich investor. If the project fails, you'll have to spend time/effort to repay the $100k instead of just moving on to the next project.