I think what the author is talking about is having too much money to the point where a lot of it gets wasted before a solid business model is proven.<p>However, I still believe that seed funding is important to most startups for the simple fact that if you have to worry about paying for groceries and food, you're not going to be able to focus 100% on your startup.<p>A 30k - 150k seed round could go a long way for most startups and I think is almost required just to get the basics covered.
I speak from my startup's experience. We thought we were a lock for angel funding around 4 months ago. Finally, all the answers came back, "no". We believe it was because it's our first startup, and we did indeed look like the cardboard rocket ship to investors. They loved the cardboard rocket, but weren't about to give us a quarter of a million dollars to turn it into a real rocket.<p>We have since gone through 3 <i>major</i> pivots (possibly 4, depending on how you split it). One of them was to consult in order to bootstrap -- something through which we've learned a lot about our customers. 2 of them were pretty big changes to our core business.<p>Interestingly, our original concept is still the long term goal. Hearing "no" from investors just made us realize that we need to build certain foundations before we can build our mansion of a company. This is likely a consequence of us being overly ambitious at the start of the project.
Okay, am I the only one who's a bit tired of hearing that every rejection is a badge of honour and the like? I mean, okay, learn from failures and all that, but they aren't badges, they're things to avoid. There's no need to sugar-coat it, sometimes your idea just sucks or is unworkable. Take the feedback and do your best with it, but being proud of it is a bit of a stretch.
hey all- thanks for taking an interest in the post, I've really enjoyed reading your feedback.<p>the impetus for this one was a series of conversations with entrepreneurs who said they were glad we hadn't funded them when they initially approached us. In retrospect, they felt that funding the wrong direction for them would have validated their bad idea and reenforced their belief that it was worth pursing. The push back ended up forcing them to really think about where to spend their time and limited resources.<p>The other conversations have been with entrepreneurs and founders expressing concern that its too easy to raise seed funding right now. That there's a growing sense of entitlement and arrogance particularly in the bay area. That half baked ideas aren't getting push back; rather, they're getting validated and compounding the entitlement problem.<p>No one knows how all of this is going to play out over the long aul. Just trying to lend a little perspective to those going through their own fundraising process.