While broadly I have to agree with much of what Fred said there, I do have some qualifications. At the end Fred did mention family, etc. Here he was way too w

While broadly I have to agree with much of what Fred said there, I do have some qualifications. At the end Fred did mention family, etc. Here he was way too weak: A recent phrase is "The greatest prize life has to offer", and that's husband and wife, house and home, mother and father, with everyone busy, productive, and, thus, happy. "Thus happy"? One of the standard ways to be unhappy is to be idle, doing nothing. One of the best ways to be happy is to be busy and productive. All that said, I have three points of qualification: (1) It can be a bit self-serving for a venture partner to tell everyone else, especially entrepreneurs, that they should not think too much about valuation. (2) I have wondered if the recent late stage equity fundings with high valuations have a dark side: Maybe the end of that little process over time stands on average to favor the venture firm: If (A) the company does not do really well, then the venture firm still stands to get their money back via the term sheet liquidation preferences. And (B) if the company does do well, then the high valuation might be seen as a starting point for negotiations with the investment bankers on the offering price of the IPO or an M&A exit in which case the venture firm not only gets their money back but makes a bundle (big ROI). (3) As has become more common recently in the press on startups, now the way may be clear for some significant number of solo entrepreneurs with little or no equity funding to create a company worth $1 billion just from net present value of after tax earnings in which case all the discussion about equity funding is next to moot. The common example is the Canadian romantic match making site Plenty of Fish which was long just one guy, two old Dell servers, and revenue of $10 million a year just from ads via Google. So, that's about $10 million a year pre-tax earnings and, thus, maybe, a company worth $1 billion. I know; I know: From none other than John Doerr at KPCB, "Ideas are easy and worthless. Execution is everything.". Hmm ...: Given an idea, now plug together a development computer, install a lot of free infrastructure software, use some frameworks, etc. to write the routine software, write the rest, the secret sauce, as just ordinary code, plug together a server, plug into an ISP, get ads from ad servers on-line, use a content distribution network (CDN) to handle much of the Internet traffic, go live, get some revenue and earnings, maybe expand to a local colocation site or to the cloud, and grow. So, where's this execution that is not routine! Or, for such a scenario, given a good idea, the rest is routine. Then the idea and associated secret sauce are "everything" and likely challenging. Or, for a venture partner to claim that ideas are worthless looks like an initial negotiating position to claim that what the entrepreneur has before a term sheet is worthless. Cute. Silly, insulting, dysfunctional, but cute.