[Wavelets]

This is a really good blog post, and a timely one for me. Our company is also taking this road less traveled and it's really not easy (not that building any business - VC backed or not - is easy!). My co-founder and I struggle with this decision constantly since this is no side hustle for us - we're in 100% and are paying for living expenses and businesses expenses with our own funds.

However, money is not the biggest issue because we saved and planned for this effort. It's exactly what was written "The Tradeoff" section that's the biggest difficulty with not working with VCs. We constantly see competitors and semi-competitors in our industry posting on LinkedIn about recent fund raising rounds, new contracts, acquisitions, etc. and every post seems to have 1000s of likes. Obviously it's not all due to VC support, but that community and network really does help (and is enticing).

It's funny... in my industry people seem to have forgotten that you can build a company without taking VC. It feels like our customer base equates small business with any new business even if that company has taken $250M of VC.

[jabo]

Author here. Tell me about it! I have to remind myself that all the excitement around fund raising announcements also come with the side-effect of raising the stakes and increasing risk even more for the company, along with increased pressure to grow, cover more use cases, make the product complicated, etc. Then fund raising announcements become unenviable.