THIS! I have been a founder and/or CTO for around a dozen startups. Two exited successfully by M&A, but they made only enough money to offset the others I lost my ass on. (One of those was due to being 20 years too early - that product might sell well, now...)

I'm no longer interested in a doing a startup for someone else to own and control. (My biggest startup mistake was hiring an experienced CEO and COO to run my dream startup. The person with the vision and dream needs to be calling the shots, and hired guns are only just that... Passion for the product is really important!)

Although I love startups, they are hard and take a LOT out of you. It's not worth the hit to your life (and your family's!)just to make a pile of equity/money for some ungrateful trust fund kid or a VC partner who thinks their crap doesn't stink just because they happened to be in the right place when their first startup hit big.

VC investment is fundamentally parasitic. If you're building a software/services startup, you almost never really need VC - if you can build a product company without it, do so. I live in Austin, where there are a LOT of startups and startup people. Out of all of them, I know one inventor/technical founder who thinks that taking VC was really worth it, and didn't get screwed over by being liquidated to death. That's not a real good showing for the VC guys. Just sayin'...