[mahmoudimus]

If you're taking money from investors and you're interested in being profitable, then you're going to sacrifice growth for the sake of profitability:

  - Let's not hire for this idea because it eats into our burn
  - Hmm, let's hold off on launching this feature until we have more data

Investment $ means taking risks (within reason) to maximize shareholder value.

If the company you worked for was profitable, then they could've structured a leveraged debt payoff to the investors to get them off the cap-table. Unless the company took so much money that the investors owned 60%+ and they unanimously do not agree about being profitable, then this is something that can be passed as a board resolution.

It sounds like the founders at your company were just inexperienced.