A fun puzzle: if today you take $10m of VC funding at a $20m post-money valuation (ie you sold 50% your company), how much will you get if you sell the company for $20m tomorrow?

Answer: typically, you’ll walk away with $5m (25%) or less. VC funds usually have a 1x preference, which means the get their $10m back (plus interest), and THEN they split the remaining proceeds with you 50-50%.

So if you take VC money, you might have to double your valuation just to keep your take-home value the same.

VC makes sense if you can grow fast and very large. But assuming you have scenarios to grow slower or to a smaller size, those scenarios often turn into bad ones if you’ve taken VC funding.