First, thanks for the thorough response.

Let me preface this response by saying that I don't have direct experience in any of this. That being said, I'm not sure that renders my points immediately invalid from a logical perspective (though, definitely from an experience perspective, it may).

For the most part, I completely agree about growth. You can do everything wrong but kill it on growth (either revenue, or a proxy for future growth such as user count/engagement), and none of the mistakes matter. You can do everything right but have weak growth, and you're still dead.

I think there are many ways to mitigate risk without growing - in fact, growth often exacerbates risk. Here are some examples of risk:

* Operational risk (payments errors, fat finger mistakes)

* Cultural risk (diluted or confrontational culture)

* Legal risk (sticking with old contracts that nobody thought to update)

* Technical risk (ie. too much technical debt)

* Key man risk

* Security risks (cyber or otherwise)

* Concentration risk (eg. one main vendor/supplier, one main platform like selling on Amazon)

Yes - cash can mitigate these risks, but growth is definitely not the same thing as cashflow. If you have cashflow, you should absolutely spend it toward mitigating risks as well as pursuing growth (ie. new features, new target markets). When you raise funding, it is often deployed to either _risk mitigation_ or _growth opportunities_. Of course, you can also do both of these without VC - cash is cash.

I do think it's important to note that large companies can move somewhat fast, but also somewhat slow.

It is _very hard_ for a large company to (a) be exposed to an idea, (b) agree it's a good idea (is it really worth risking our core competency/brand?), (c) allocate the resources to a team (as if people are just sitting around unstaffed! you almost always have to hire), (d) motivate the team to actually work faster than the startup (though yes they will have more resources), and (e) execute well. None of these are guaranteed. However, it is very cheap to _threaten_ that you can do all this stuff and never have to worry about a competitor!

People who are incentivized to - namely, investors (an acquirer is also an investor) - will wave a few case studies about how this happened in the past, so you better watch out. However, I don't think this is statistically very probable.

Nevertheless, founders are often uninformed and often believe what people with expertise (and not perfectly aligned interests) say. It is very hard to find a VC, almost by their very nature, who is aligned with a founder without persuading that founder to part from her own long-term interests. (For example, VC always has an incentive to pump a startup with risk, since it's effectively a call option.)

All in all, I personally think it's important to realize that VC's main value-add is running a book, almost like an investment banker. They raise capital so _you don't have to_. That's a lot of work! That's valuable!

But somewhere in the process, they became the gatekeepers for starting a business (we provide network! recruiting! expertise! everything!), and that's quite literally not their primary job. It's just a very convenient tale to tell founders because it increases deal flow.

Anyway, I do admit, those are my very uninformed opinions and I could be wrong about quite a lot.