[ilaksh]

OK so this is a pretty basic question about something I don't understand. If companies are making money, why do they need to keep getting more money from investors? Don't they eventually have to actually make enough profit to pay back the investors? Or is the assumption now that companies don't operate on profit, and are mainly there to either eventually fold up in bankruptcy or serve as winning lottery tickets for the investors when a bigger companies buys them?

[finkin1]

Capital makes things go faster. Bootstrapping with a 5 person team instead of taking money so that you can expand to a 20 person team is a perfectly reasonable strategy. There are just trade-offs.