We're not raising money either. We took a small amount (< $6,000!) from an angel, and that's it.

I've been working for startups for 25 years, both as early stage employee and as founder.

I feel that the general sentiment really underestimates the cost of VCs.

There's several reasons I'm inclined to pass on VCs:

1. In the early stages it is a huge distraction, and worse, while you're still figuring out what your company really is-- finding product/market fit, etc, having a VC in there pushing the flavor of the day is not a good thing. The VC is looking in the rearview mirror, not at the market and not forward, but chasing whatever's hitting right now.

Notice how many Video sites got funded when YouTube got bought? How many of them are around now? When the latest news means "you gotta have a video story!!@!!" thats just a distraction your startup doesn't need.

When you're at the point that you have a profitable engine and need to scale it, then VC money can be taken and poured into customer acquisition, capital needs to scale production, etc.

But when you're just figuring it out, an accelerator or angel money is the way to go. Or go without if you can, even better.

I'm concerned that Accelerators have been "demo day bootcamps" that focus too much on pitching and not enough on business development (or customer development) ... and slot you right into thaking a big VC round when your company is only a few months old and not ready to scale.

In fact, given my experience, I'd bet if you analyzed the failures of companies that came out of great accelerators, you'd find that a lot of them got VC money (and influence, distractions, etc.) too early.

2. The cost of money from VCs is always too high. They have way too many "hostile" deal terms that they "need because they're taking such a huge risk", but this ignores the fact that you're taking even more risk. Their shares should not be more valuable than your shares that you put actual sweat into. They want special incentives because they are "early money", but you're even earlier money, and worse you spent TIME which is more valuable than money.

Thus the situations where taking VC money makes sense are the ones where you get a rather good deal from them, yet still can't get by with ploughing profits back in, or taking a loan from a bank or some other funding source.

In fact, now that there are angel.co syndicates, why should you take money from VCs? You can raise a couple million from a syndicate of angels, get better terms, and spend less time on angel.co than running around the bay area for half a year.

3. VCs are always pitched as "it's not the money, it's the connections". I've seen very few anecdotes where this turned out to be true, but I've directly experienced many situations where the VCs killed the company. In fact, every VC backed company I've been involved with that failed, and a lot of the early (lower) exits, were caused by VCs. Sometimes these are seen as "fights between the founders" but even then it's because the VCs are trying to force the company to do the wrong thing ("What's your video story?!") and half the founders see it or want to just go along to minimize conflict and the other half of the founders realize it is a company-killing idea. Other times when a founder is too strong the VCs have worked to undermine him, push him out, etc.

VCs meddle too much, and I've seen very little actual productive help.