Benn Stancil on benn.substack

I do think there's something to be said for raising less, and if I were to do things again, I'd be very deliberate about how I raised. But that's less about money making you lathargic, and more about keeping control of the the throttle. Once you take a big enough check, you have to go for broke. And I think a lot of startups commit to that path way sooner than they should. (I will say, overall thrust aside, I think that post gets a lot wrong. I think the argument that VCs are aggressively pushing huge rounds on companies is mostly a caricature that only happens to a handful of very hot deals. Plus, it just dimisses offhand that companies that raise more money aren't more successful, which I doubt is actually true, and almost certainly isn't literally true, since successful companies will almost by definition raise more than those that fail.) Still, assuming that trend is true... - on products, I don't think we get better ones. Like, had dbt not raised money, what would they have done instead? They'd still have to make money, still be competing against an open source thing, etc. They might've retained more good will, but it's hard to imagine that the product would be better had it been built by a handful of engineers scraping by and consulting part time than by a full team dedicated to it full time. On the ecosystem, I could see either way? Crypto seems like a good signal here. Lots of money in the system didn't actually create durable products; it just attacted a lot of people looking to get rich quick. Data probably has some of the same dynamics, where people got into it because they could get funding and the clout that came with it, not because of any real dedication to the problem. Maybe some of those blind squirrels find nuts, but for the most part, it just seems like a waste of money. On VCs, this one seems the most straightforward - a lot of funds die. Which seems...right? Just as a lot of people started companies who weren't that interested in the problem, a lot of people also started funds who had no real business doing it. There's no way that money was all well spent.