[Alex3917]

> If you're doing badly, why would you want to keep working on this for 24 or 36 months? That’s a waste of your time.

If you were writing a book and it was taking six months longer than expected, but was otherwise high quality, would you just abandon it? Or would you say that, you know what, in the big picture an extra six months isn't really material in terms of the expected benefits that will accrue over the next 20 years of my career?

I understand that by raising capital you're committing to provide a certain return on investment. But if you're actually making progress toward creating some asset of value, then structuring your business so that you need to shut it down if it's taking longer than expected seems to be not aligned with what would seemingly be in the best interests of any rational stakeholder.

[akharris]

Each endeavor you undertake will have different hurdles for how to define worthwhile progress. You need to evaluate what you're doing against a the right framework.

To use your example - if you're writing a book as your full time job and, after 12 months, haven't finished the first page of your manuscript, it would make sense to seriously reconsider whether or not you should be writing that book.

[Alex3917]

I agree with reconsidering whether or not to continue if you're not hitting your milestones. But by raising the minimum amount of money necessary to hit your milestones, you're not giving yourself the ability to reconsider unless you're default alive.

So I guess what I'm saying is that if you're default alive, this strategy makes a lot of sense. But if you're default dead, it seems reckless. E.g. there was nothing structurally wrong with a lot of the companies that got wiped out due to covid, and I'm sure there were lots of founders that would have happily just scaled down for six months or whatever but were locked into agreements that didn't leave them with the ability to do that.

[alasdair_]

> To use your example - if you're writing a book as your full time job and, after 12 months, haven't finished the first page of your manuscript, it would make sense to seriously reconsider whether or not you should be writing that book.

Hopefully no one shows this comment to George RR Martin...

[imtringued]

>If you were writing a book and it was taking six months longer than expected, but was otherwise high quality, would you just abandon it?

That's the opposite of doing badly. If success is only a few months away then you can simply ask for more funding.