[curiousllama]

This article boils down to "all things equal, it is better to own your company than not." Yes, of course.

But it also ignores that the primary reason to raise money is to leapfrog: a business is not short-term sustainable, but IS long-term, and investor capital gets you over that hump.

With this view, the reason higher-value companies get diluted more is because the hump is larger: founders can only justify a high valuation with a significant influx of capital (the before-cash valuation is effectively 0), leaving the investors with the bargaining power, not the founders.

Yes, people should be less enamored by the VC hyper-growth model than they are, but that doesn't mean that people already in the forget-short-term-profits game shouldn't raise a lot of money.

[rabidrat]

> a business is not short-term sustainable, but IS long-term, and investor capital gets you over that hump.

Unfortunately, investor capital changes the dynamics such that what would be long-term sustainable without investment, may very well not be long-term sustainable with investment.