You can if you put your personal assets and reputation at stake instead. To a degree, this is what you're doing in a startup anyway. You're putting your money, time and energy on the line, and hoping for a reasonable return on that.

Granted, you may be right in that it's not worth it for many projects. The project we're working on isn't as sexy as some though, and is unlikely to take over the world. What it does have is a moderate number (300ish) of users ready to sign on as paying customers at launch, and a good chance to tripling that within 6 months. Those aren't retire to Tahiti numbers, but they're enough to pay for dev.

Those sort of numbers make it hard to approach most AAs, who want to see a 10:1 investment:return