[Aurornis]

If you want to feel real urgency, try working at a company attempting to bootstrap without VC funding. Unless your company is very lucky to strike gold early on, the pressure to deliver fast and get money coming in is even more real. Everyone wants to start getting paid real salaries instead of eating ramen noodles. Everyone wishes they could hire a few more people to spread the workload around.

Startups are very hard, period. In my experience, the ones that get VC funding are a less stressful than those that don’t because you start with a generous buffer of money in the bank and you have investors who might backstop the company’s bank account if you run out. They do want returns, but bootstrapped companies also want returns too. That bootstrapped founder who sacrificed potential earnings for years to get their startup off the ground wants employees delivering fast, too.

It’s not a religion or cult. It’s the reality of startups. Something is risked to start them and the people who risk it expect a larger reward than they would have received. For VCs, that larger reward has to be better averaged returns than investing in the stock market or other investments. For founders, that large reward needs to be larger wealth than what they could have gotten working for FAANG. The pressure comes either way.