[rrhyne]

Founders need to balance the amount of time it takes to acquire traction on the cheap, vs. via through the acceleration having a larger marketing and dev budget provides. Stagnation can kill and smaller founder equity is better than dead.

[not_that_noob]

That's a false dichotomy encouraged by VCs. More money does not necessarily accelerate. It's making sure you're getting the max value for every dollar spent, something that's quickly forgotten when you raise millions of dollars.

[nostrademons]

Some of the more savvy and founder-friendly VCs actually say the opposite, eg. "Keep the team as small as possible until you reach product/market fit" (Andreesen) or "Perhaps more dangerously, once you take a lot of money it gets harder to change direction" (PG).

I think the overall point is not to never take outside investment, it's to carefully consider where you are in your product's lifecycle and what your market actually looks like before you take outside money. Refusing VC money if your market is huge means that someone else will take it and eat the whole market. Taking VC money when your market is small will kill your company just the same, because you won't be free to make the trade-offs necessary for a small company to succeed in a niche market.