[Mikho]

In general, any decision in the early days has a long tail and consequences. Hire the wrong person—and start-up wastes not only a semi-annual or an annual salary (more than $30K) but also a lot of valuable time. Sometimes wrong hire could kill a start-up just by wasting all the money early.

It's good to optimize in the early days but it's also important to not be penny wise and pound-foolish. In general, today there are a lot of standard deals, documents, and lawyers who specialize in start-up deals. Properly speaking, for a law firm it is usually worth making its services inexpensive and accessible for fresh start-ups since it's the firm's investment in keeping these start-ups as clients should they grow and become big. It's not worth it for a lawyer to rip off a start-up for pennies and lose this start-up as a client when it becomes big. Not to mention losing reputation among other startups. So, for a start-up, it's worth finding the right lawyer who works mostly with start-ups and not rely on "general practices" pushed by a VC or VC's own loyal lawyer that surprisingly serves only this VC's pocket.

Taking money at the early stage is a tough game. When founders take an investor's money, the investor's business model becomes the business model of their start-up: only outlier growth and outsized returns. The longer start-ups bootstrap the better it is for founders and for business. Preferably, to bootstrap till the product-market/fit and take money only as a fuel for growth. This way a start-up has a lot of leverage in fundraising since it doesn't need money to survive—just to have more fuel to make the fire bigger.

Calculations in my post make it obvious that any pre-seed round (including Y Combinator's deal) results in founders losing a very big chunk (30%+) of their start-up by the time they close the next Seed round or priced round in YC'S deal case.

Nevertheless, if there are no other options and the only one is to take money early, then so be it. It's better like this than nothing at all.