[smacktoward]

The wrinkle in #2 is that once you decide to take conventional venture funding (as opposed to bootstrapping, or fundraising through angels, incubators, etc.), you really don't have the option to just be a small, sustainable business anymore. VCs don't want to invest in small, sustainable businesses, they want to invest in aggressive plays that have the potential to blow up into something huge.

According to TechCrunch the only money Reddit ever raised was $100k of seed funding (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/reddit). That's a very different trajectory than Twitter, who (again according to TC: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter) have raised $1.16 billion (with a B) in funding.

Taking in that sort of money raises the stakes dramatically. Nobody loans you a billion dollars to build a $50 million/year business.

[jdbernard]

> Taking in that sort of money raises the stakes dramatically. Nobody loans you a billion dollars to build a $50 million/year business.

That was OzzyB's original point: Twitter should not have taken big VC money. They took too much money. From his first post:

> someone promised the moon to a bunch of financiers and now they have to deliver above and beyond of what Twitter could have been, or should have just been.