[AndrewKemendo]

>If your instinct is to say "fuck VC", you shouldn't be taking their money either.

This is a key takeaway I think. If you take investor money, you de-facto lose the "creating value" monopoly despite the fact that the founders are in fact the ones who are creating value (by building the business) - not investors.

What happens is causation gets muddled, so an investor can always say "well it wouldn't have happened without me!" when that might not have been the case. No one will ever know though.

[tptacek]

When you execute a business plan that can't possibly work without a runway bought with millions of dollars of someone else's money, there's some pretty clear causation.