[lubujackson]

This is all true... if you play the VC game of growing your business before you have revenue to support the growth. The fact is many web-based businesses can be built without spending all your time raising money that you need because of a self-fulfilling burn-rate crisis. Some businesses need VC, but you should ALWAYS avoid VC if you can.

[gfodor]

Yeah I'd tend to agree here -- a lot of this stress in this article can be mitigated by a) attacking an idea that leads to revenue quickly, or at least can be market validated clearly quickly and b) only raising the stakes (ie, raising money, going after "whale" purchase orders) once this revenue or validation has materialized. As a nice side effect, the process of raising money or landing sales once you've got some validation not only reduces the risk of failure but also makes the process a lot easier and less time consuming anyway. (Kickstarter is a hell of a way to do this nowadays.)

It's still going to be a stressful ride but getting a few things like this right early on can basically "de-leverage" your risk profile in starting a company from being (metaphorically) 100x to "merely" 10x.