[togilvie]

I think you've answered your own question. Taking outside money will make life busier, increase pressure, and create investor expectations that may be different from your own.

Bringing in an investor that would be willing to replace you with a new management team is a Bad Idea(tm). It's also a bad idea to try to mislead your investors and replace yourselves.

Outside money can be great if you want to build a really big business and need the capital to win the market. But there are tons of businesses that are better off using revenue as funding.

One of the drawbacks of the tech media is how few people talk publicly about the businesses where the founders would have been much better off if they'd only avoided funding.

[asifjamil]

> But there are tons of businesses that are better off using revenue as funding.

Any specific examples?

[nthnclrk]

You mean literally the majority of all successful businesses that have ever existed?

[tim333]

Fog Creek is an interesting example partly because it's written up and also because it's kind of a hybrid where they've remained self funded but spun off VC funded ventures in Trello and in some ways Stack Exchange http://www.foundersatwork.com/joel-spolksy.html

[StavrosK]

Interesting how that page has misspelt Spolsky's last name in half the places.

[wslh]

If you are asking about large private companies take a look at this US list: http://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/#tab:ra...