[deltron3030]

>Why is VC funding so down the rank compared to self funding, friends and family, angels and even debt?

Mental health and emotional attachment I guess, working at a scale you're comfortable working at. The tools, frameworks etc. you prefer, and the community around those can all contribute to developer happiness.

So if you optimize mainly for growth you might throw many things out of the window. I think the more developer you are as an entrepreneur the more you may want to stay within a scale that's comfortable for you.

The VC way seems to be more suited for more marketing oriented entrepreneurs who may not even code and develop an emotional attachment towards their tools, their joy may come more from growth aspect, so basically the opposite of what a dev might want.

[threeseed]

> The VC way seems to be more suited for more marketing oriented entrepreneurs who may not even code

Actually this is completely wrong.

Investors at all stages from angel to VCs look for strong technical and product leadership from the founding team. Unless you have had a previous successful startup you will not get funding if you are some random executive with an MBA who doesn't know the technical details of the product.

And the reason a lot of entrepreneurs go the VC route is because you get money e.g. $2-5 million which allows you to set up a proper team and build a proper product without worrying about paying the bills. And because they want their product to be used by as many people as possible.

[deltron3030]

>Unless you have had a previous successful startup you will not get funding if you are some random executive with an MBA who doesn't know the technical details of the product.

I don't disagree with that, the discussion is about devs avoiding VC funding and why, not about what VCs want and a perfect world.

My impression is that preferences of marketers are a better fit for VCs than the preferences of devs, and it's obvious that they're looking for a mix of both, but this seems to become hard with devs putting their mental health first. They can still make a good living by staying small, and at some point your happiness just doesn't scale with more money.

>And the reason a lot of entrepreneurs go the VC route is because you get money e.g. $2-5 million which allows you to set up a proper team and build a proper product without worrying about paying the bills.

The thing is that a proper team can require different processes than those of a single developer/entrepreneur, and that's exactly what I meant. And while you don't have to worry about bills, you still have to worry about your reputation in your niche. If you've just discovered a market and create an app around that, good, but that's not what most devs do, they create something around their area of expertise.

If your product isn't special, like most ones out there your reputation in your niche is what counts, especially true if you make the typical SaaS app and create tools for other developers.