[puranjay]

While I understand where you're coming from, and even feel emotionally invested in the idea of bootstrapping, objectively speaking, it's a bad decision to stay self-funded. It is, after all, a business, and if you can accelerate your business' growth 100x by taking on some very smart outside investors and hire very smart people, why wouldn't you?

[btilly]

You might not because the goals of a founder and an investor are different.

Investors know that their returns are generated by a handful of super-successful companies. And so they have a natural pressure to "swing for the fences".

Founders have a tremendous amount tied up in THIS company, and are naturally risk-adverse.

So you get conflicts like the following. There is an initiative which has 20% chance of losing everything, but could double how much you make. Investors will always want to go for it. Founders reasonably may not.

[iphone7166]

A typical woodhead's thought. "Accelerate your business's growth". Hahaha. Hard things have to be done solo because explaining to others is slowwwwwwww.

[AndrewKemendo]

Hard things have to be done solo because explaining to others is slowwwwwwww.

A million times this. I never really understood how hard it was to explain a (in my mind) simple new technology to the lay person until I had to do it. This is even after spending years as a technical briefer for high power executives.

[iphone7166]

What I was meaning is actually not about external investors or so. My point is, sometimes even putting more equally competent technical collaborators won't work; it's like digging a tunnel: the working surface is only that wide, an extra worker can do little more than staring at the working man's ass.

[zymhan]

Because if all of that will distract you from actually developing the product. Granted this won't work for most people, but if you're extremely talented like geohot then it may not be a bad call.

[ffn]

Because creating a self-driving car is an extremely creativity-intensive exercise that demands "smartness"... but smartness doesn't add linearly (or, I could posit even monotonically). If 1 smart guy can produce 1 self-driving car in say 6 months, it doesn't mean 2 smart guys can produce a self-driving in 3 months. Once you have a bunch of people, 2nd order and third order interactions between us get complicated and managing that becomes its own time/money-sink.

As for money, yes, it can accelerate growth in its first-order effect; but it also induces stress and so threatens early exhaustion of your other precious resource: personal motivation.

So, as a crack-shot programmer, if you know with 90% certainty you can crank out a self-driving car in 6 months by yourself or fail, but only 20% certainty you can arrange a cohesive team with someone else's money to crank out a car in 1 month or fail (and alienate your team, and ruin your credit)... I would advise taking the 6 months route. Patience is a virtue and sometimes it's better not buying into every pot of snake-oil the SV hype machine wants to sell us.