But the "house keeping" as you call it is what it really means to run a business. Any idiot can make progress when you've got millions in the bank to throw at a problem, real progress is made when your revenue/expenses ratio keeps growing, raw revenue growth is useless.

He would have had to spend time on fundraising and then keeping outside investors happy, rather than focusing on his business. Yes, there would be a few more zeros on the bank account balance but there would also be new concerns and new opinions to deal with.

It also wouldn't have solved his problem. VC money in this case would have been like putting a bandage on an cut artery. It'll slow the bleeding temporarily but someone still has to sew things up at some point.

If he took money without learning the "discipline" lesson, expenses would have continued to go up (possibly even more, because he would have had more money to throw at problems).

When did housekeeping become some sort of unnecessary burden? This is what building a business is all about. This is the stuff that makes a company succeed or fail.

In this case, it's not something to outsource or forget about even when raising money since cashflow management just becomes more complicated and increases the risks of opaque numbers catching up and killing the company when the runway ends.

Growth/product are not nearly the major challenges in business, unlike what Silicon Valley likes to keep repeating.

No he needs to housekeep at some point. To me very little downside and tons of upside to what he did.