"Literally everyone knows that those things don't matter for super early stage startups."

If literally everyone knows that then I don't need to be commenting, as my replies in this subthread are to someone insisting that balance sheets matter even before a company has a working product. Clearly they don't.

It seems the people "reacting" are imagining some deeper intention or elaborate plot or some complicated character weakness behind it all.

I just see him repeating what he's said for years: for early stage companies, you should just focus on making something people want.