[PaulHoule]

Also from the viewpoint of management, management can put a tremendous amount of effort into getting funding and it really is on front of their mind.

There's a common case where people hear "company X raised $250 million" and people think "I could do that with $2.5 million, what are they going to do, spend the rest on hookers and cocaine?"

If you've got discipline it isn't bad to have more money than you need because you can keep it in the bank account and either give it back or have it left over when the company gets acquired.

I worked at one place where the investors didn't trust management to be disciplined so they controlled the pursestrings tightly and gave out funding in measured drops -- if anything that caused the discipline problems to be worse since it kept them from focusing on long-term problems.