Having tremendous success with their first Kickstarter likely helped them get favorable terms when they raised their series A, but that applies to any company,

Having tremendous success with their first Kickstarter likely helped them get favorable terms when they raised their series A, but that applies to any company, not just Pebble. I don't know what the terms their Angel investors got before the Kickstarter, and I'm not familiar with what is 'normal' for SV angels to get. I do know that YC startups fork over ~10% of their company for a few hundred grand in cash, but YC brings a wide network of connections and social signaling for future capital raises to the table. Even it was just cash and no YC connections, if I were thinking about starting a young hardware startup, (if it were offered), I'd still probably trade whatever % of my early stage startup for the few hundred grand necessary to be able to hire the handful of right people and get to the point where I had a 'good enough' prototype + software to take to Kickstarter and (hopefully) get enough cash pledged to manufacture and ship a v1 product. Of course, you could work a day job and save back that necessary cash and then fund the startup yourself and keep 100% of the company. Or be already independently wealthy. Or be a savant and do all the work yourself. Or get a traditional bank loan. Or some combination of the above. But the SV way of trading a relatively small percentage of your company for an initial cash infusion of a few hundred thousand dollars is a valid option that many people would love to have.