Investors know that their returns are generated by a handful of super-successful companies. And so they have a natural pressure to "swing for the fences".
Founders have a tremendous amount tied up in THIS company, and are naturally risk-adverse.
So you get conflicts like the following. There is an initiative which has 20% chance of losing everything, but could double how much you make. Investors will always want to go for it. Founders reasonably may not.
A million times this. I never really understood how hard it was to explain a (in my mind) simple new technology to the lay person until I had to do it. This is even after spending years as a technical briefer for high power executives.
As for money, yes, it can accelerate growth in its first-order effect; but it also induces stress and so threatens early exhaustion of your other precious resource: personal motivation.
So, as a crack-shot programmer, if you know with 90% certainty you can crank out a self-driving car in 6 months by yourself or fail, but only 20% certainty you can arrange a cohesive team with someone else's money to crank out a car in 1 month or fail (and alienate your team, and ruin your credit)... I would advise taking the 6 months route. Patience is a virtue and sometimes it's better not buying into every pot of snake-oil the SV hype machine wants to sell us.