This was a great piece! Reading between the lines, what this article told me was that founders should NOT look to a VC for funding of any kind. Why? Because of all of the “reasons” you just listed. Here is where I go into soapbox mode …

At the end of the day, if you’re building a company to attract a VC, forget it. You need to build a company to attract and serve CUSTOMERS; to fix something that’s broken; to relieve a pain point. Screw the VC. To me, the VC is basically a lazy stupid bunch looking for low hanging fruit; that rare opportunity to cash-in on a really great business concept and team that they often times had nothing to do with early on. Just because the VC said no, does not mean your team or your concept or your product is bad, it means they’re lazy and their overreaching business models don’t “fit” yours. This is fine. Fuck them. Grow your company anyway!

Oh, but now that your venture is moderately successful, sure, NOW they’re interested in you. Sure, you can attract these sharks with a successful venture, but don’t do it. You really don’t need their money. Grow your venture a bit slower and a bit more steady and you will keep all of your equity and not have to share it with people who are just trying to use you because they’re too stupid and too lazy to come up with their own great ideas themselves.

And just so we know, most VC investments fail. Sure, you can see the super-stars, the Stripe’s, the Facebook’s, the eBay’s, et. al., but you never hear about their 50 failures for every success. These are not smart people. Just look at WeWork, they dumped billions into it … hmm, I wonder if this was Karma? And Silicon Valley just dumped another $50M into the valley’s 30th block-chain, IoT or machine-learning startup. Yea, not smart.

I keep reading more and more articles about NOT pursuing VC funding to launch and grow your business. I’m taking that to heart. Maybe you should as well.