I would posit that studies of lottery winners and human psychology could help predict the behaviors and fates of founders that receive VC-funding. Founders may

I would posit that studies of lottery winners and human psychology could help predict the behaviors and fates of founders that receive VC-funding. Founders may have much better (self-selected) odds of success, but financial management remains a separate skill-set from product/service development and funding solicitation. Other studies demonstrate that wealth tends to decrease empathy and influence the mind in other ways. Whatever their past history, you are dealing with a different person after they take VC funding. This goes doubly so for predicting your own behavior, given the intrinsic limits of self-awareness. This is why I have taken a tiered approach to my own creative projects. I started with a small Kickstarter, just enough to gauge whether people would pay for a novel. That succeeded. Even though the funding failed to cover all the production costs, the several hundred dollars in expenses after that made for a very cheap education in crowdsourcing. For my next project, I plan to do an anthology. It requires similar skills to a novel, but involves working with many more people, more coordination, and more money. Even if I lost all of my work and had to start it from scratch, though, it would only put me out a few thousand dollars. Only after a such few projects, each of increasing complexity, will I take on even a small-scale video game Kickstarter. By that time, though, I will have mastered all of the production skills and will only need to ramp up on each. And the most important of those skills? I will know what to do with thousands or tens of thousands of backer dollars. That way, even a wildly successful Kickstarter (and video games are the most-funded category) will require managing perhaps only 10x more money than before, rather than 100-1000x. I will already know what I don't require to get a project out the door.