[ibdknox]

This doesn't preclude a company from seeking funding elsewhere and I can imagine very, very few companies at this stage that could legitimately burn through $80k in 3 months. If that doesn't get you close enough to at least prove something that could be used as a basis for raising more, it's probably time to take a step back and figure out if that's really the best strategy for moving forward.

[kami8845]

Yes. But this takes time away from building things when you only have 3 months before demo day, and I'm sure there's always stigma attached to pursuing "outside-money" when everyone else is fine taking the 80k from the 4 investors YC trusts.

[ibdknox]

I agree. I meant that you could raise after demo day. As I said, it's pretty unlikely that you must have more than the 100k you'll get during that time, even for hardware. Plus constraint in this case is a good thing, virtually anything can be built given enough money, but in order for a company to exist you need to be able to build it at some reasonable cost. If your prototype is going to burn through all of that cash, it's time to get creative and find a way to do it for less.

[rwallace]

That may be true in many cases but as a counterexample, SpaceX needed rather more than 100k to reach minimum viable product.