[frogpelt]

It doesn't appear that greghinch was harping on the semantics. He's harping on the frustration about investors getting to call the shots on feature X or schedule Y.

As I understand it, that's the startup game. If you want to call the shots and build your own dream, don't take the money.

Makes perfect sense to me.

[nostrademons]

Except it's not the startup game. Larry and Sergey got to call the shots with Google (much to their investors' chagrin). Zuckerburg got to call the shots with Facebook. Both of those were high-growth startups that took VC money. They got to call the shots because they were high-growth companies with a lot of leverage.

The startups where the VCs end up calling the shots are the ones that are on bootstrapped revenue and user-acquisition trajectories but with VC funding. You have no leverage in that situation, because they provided all the money and you're providing...nothing useful at the moment. If you're careful about taking VC funding only once you've validated the market and your ability to execute against that market, the investors don't even want to call the shots, because if they just let you be they'll make a whole lot of money for zero effort.