> its growth at all costs
If you’ve taken VC, you had a bad VC. Otherwise, this misconstrues most VCs’ advice in a downturn, which is to prioritise staying alive.
If you’ve taken VC, you had a bad VC. Otherwise, this misconstrues most VCs’ advice in a downturn, which is to prioritise staying alive.
The defining difference between a startup and small business is scaling potential. If you can’t grow, you shouldn’t take VC.
Usually not. Most small businesses have geographic limits to their scaling potential. That said, yes, there are niches where small businesses will beat a start-up competitor, at least in the short run.
VC is expensive capital. The same dilemma exists for companies that issue high-yield debt.
> there are ways to scale even without that level of pressure but VC doesn't allow that
Genuine question: what is this?
More time. There are examples of bootstrapped businesses that may be took a decade to get to first few million which will be dead in VC terms. But they continued and got to 100s of Millions. VC model would tell them to kill it if after a decade, they were doing a lousy couple million in revenue even if on the right path with PMF.
Isn't the criticism of the last decade of VC that it backed many of these?
Everything changed and I’ve seen it change from a small agile business with nice people to a baby corporation with up or out mentality, useless processes everywhere, harassment methods from HR department. In one year, VC money created as many millionaires as employee burn-outs.