[ilamont]

“MailChimp’s path was circuitous, and it came without the glory of enormous funding rounds.”

It’s time to retire the idea that raising money equals “glory.” It’s not a measure of business success as much as it is a measure of founders being able to convince rich people to back them. As we know from the "XX is shutting down" stories that regularly grace HN, many if not most tales of massive fundraising success will eventually become business and investment failures. Yet the TechCrunch/Fortune/BI coverage angles—pushed relentlessly by the investment community and hired PR people—almost always emphasize the former over the latter.

[55555]

moz.com is a good example of raising bad money. They had an excellent core product and thus a business worth millions, then raised money to try to take over the world. It turns out they couldn't take over the world, so now all they have is the same core product and business they had prior to raising money, except now they also have dozens of millions of dollars of VC preference in the event of an acquisition.

I've toyed with the numbers in my head and I can't make them work; I think they would have been much better off not raising any money.

(I'm just an outside observer.)

[shostack]

Not to mention stress that crippled the founder Rand.