
The Future of Startup Funding - BenSchaechter
http://paulgraham.com/future.html
======
grellas
This is a really superb and thoughtful piece on the funding process. The only
issue I would take is with the idea that funding terms will become
standardized and the process routine. While, even as a lawyer, I would
actually love to see this happen (we prosper right along with our startup
clients and no one benefits from the waste that occurs with funding games), I
have not seen this happen even as all sorts of standardized documents are now
widely available to facilitate it. It can and does occur if the investors want
to settle for terms protecting their basic interests but giving them no
special advantages (what I call vanilla terms). That said, only the
friendliest of investors will do this, and by "friendly," I mean in relation
to the founders, and this usually means only friends and family or perhaps an
individual angel or two that has a long history with one or more of the
founders and wants above all other things to help promote the founders'
interests. The rest of the angels, and most certainly the institutional ones
(so-called "super angels") continue routinely to press for special advantages
of one type or other. With special advantages come special terms and with this
comes lawyer review, back-and-forth negotiations, and the like. In this sense,
absent a _huge_ shift in the balance of power toward founders, I don't see
purely standardized documentation and routine processing becoming the order of
the day anytime soon. Others may differ, and I may be wrong, but that's how I
see this based on considerable day-to-day experience in this field. That said
(for what it is worth), this is a brilliant essay that concisely encapsulates
the important trends one will encounter in early-stage startup funding, and it
should be widely disseminated to all who might have an interest in this field.

~~~
peripitea
How valuable are these non-vanilla terms to investors? Presumably you can get
anyone to commit to vanilla terms for the right price. Then it's just a
question of making big investors care less about these terms (e.g. by
repeatedly demonstrating that investments can succeed without them), or taking
more investments from people who put a lower premium on the terms (e.g. super
angels).

~~~
grellas
A thoughtful analysis by a knowledgeable lawyer (Yokum Taku of WSGR) of
various seed-stage terms and their use in standardized sets of financing
documents appears here: [http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2010/03/14/how-
do-the-sa...](http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2010/03/14/how-do-the-
sample-series-seed-financing-documents-differ-from-typical-series-a-financing-
documents/). As appears from his useful chart comparing the various standard
sets, investors (and lawyers) just have different ideas of what they regard as
important for different types of investments.

Jason Mendelson, a well-known lawyer-turned-VC, took this further in a piece
entitled "Why There Will Never Be a Standard Set of Seed Documents"
([http://www.jasonmendelson.com/wp/archives/2010/03/why-
there-...](http://www.jasonmendelson.com/wp/archives/2010/03/why-there-will-
never-be-a-standard-set-of-seed-documents-a-k-a-why-brad-feld-will-fail.php)),
in which he gets into more details about how people differ on what protections
and terms to seek when making early-stage investments.

~~~
chris123
With respect to this this article, what would be helpful would be some links
to actual convertible notes with caps and other provisions mentioned in his
piece. Anybody have anything to share with the community?

------
cperciva
_Fundraising is still terribly distracting for startups. If you're a founder
in the middle of raising a round, the round is the top idea in your mind,
which means working on the company isn't. If a round takes 2 months to close,
which is reasonably fast by present standards, that means 2 months during
which the company is basically treading water. That's the worst thing a
startup could do.

So if investors want to get the best deals, the way to do it will be to close
faster. Investors don't need weeks to make up their minds anyway. We decide
based on about 10 minutes of reading an application plus 10 minutes of in
person interview, and we only regret about 10% of our decisions. If we can
decide in 20 minutes, surely the next round of investors can decide in a
couple days._

This 20 minute figure is missing the point. What matters here -- to founders
at least -- isn't how much time YC spends on the startup. What matters is how
long the startup spends on YC. I don't know how long the average group spends
filling out the YC application form, but I'm sure it's quite a bit longer than
20 minutes.

(Back of the envelope calculation: Suppose a typical group spends 3 hours
filling out investment-application paperwork per investor they're pitching;
investors take 1 out of every 20 applicants; and a startup wants to take money
from 5 investors. Then they've just spent 300 hours -- over a month -- filling
out application forms, and it's probably going to be 2 months before they can
focus on something other than raising money again.)

~~~
pg
We thought about that, and we made a point of making the YC application
something that would be to the advantage of startups to complete even if they
never submitted it.

And conveniently for founders, there is a certain practice that's common among
YC-like organizations that makes the cost of multiple applications low (e.g.
<http://www.ventures.io/apply>).

~~~
cperciva
I agree that the YC application is useful per se and not just as a route to
funding -- in that respect it was a bad choice of example, but it was the
example of funding application paperwork which people here are most familiar
with.

But I still think that investors will need to compete not only on how quickly
they can decide to fund a startup but also based on how much effort it takes
to apply -- with the important difference that in the first case investors
will notice if they lose ("sorry, you took too long to get back to us, and
we've already got all the investors we need for this round") and in the second
case investors will simply never see the deals.

------
sama
I think this will go down as one of PG's best and most predictive essays. It
feels as if these changes are all just before the tipping point but close
enough that they're going to happen; if they do, it'll be a huge positive for
founders and the investors that adapt.

~~~
seiji
Can we Martin Luther this essay across Sand Hill Road?

Be more lenient on terms, let us raise less money at once but accumulate it
over a few mini-rounds, and leave us to do what we do best.

------
stevenbedrick
As always, PG's done a good job of writing a thought-provoking and highly
readable essay. I'm hardly qualified to comment one way or another about the
ins and outs of startup financing- I'm willing to assume that he's got the
facts right on those aspects of the essay- but one part of the essay stuck out
at me like a sore thumb: (talking about YCombinator's "competition" with
employers)

<blockquote> Nearly all customers choose the competing product, a job. Why?
Well, let's look at the product we're offering. An unbiased review would go
something like this:

Starting a startup gives you more freedom and the opportunity to make a lot
more money than a job, but it's also hard work and at times very stressful.
</blockquote>

I'd say that this represents about 80% of an "unbiased review". The missing
20%? "... it's also hard work, and at times very stressful, <em>and the odds
are very much against all of that hard work and stress paying off for you in
any kind of direct, financial way.</em>"

~~~
pg
I wouldn't put that in the product review because it's more a feature of the
user than the product.

E.g. it wouldn't be accurate to say in a product review of running shoes "you
are going to run slow in these shoes" even if on average that's what people
did.

~~~
pbiggar
In case I'm reading too much into this, am I right in think that you believe
startups are _not_ risky?

If so, then that changes nearly everything that people understand about
startups.

~~~
pg
I'm saying that while there is a large random multiplier in everyone's
outcome, the risk of total failure varies enormously with the founders. Some
founders have a near 0% chance of total failure. Others (a larger number) have
a near 100% chance. So while this means on average the change of a startup
succeeding is 1/n, quoting that stat as part of the description of a startup
would be misleading, because for a small number of people it's just not true,
just as for a small number of fast runners it would not be true that they'd
run slow in the shoes, whatever the average person did.

------
gruseom
_One of our axioms at Y Combinator is not to think of deal flow as a zero-sum
game. Our main focus is to encourage more startups to happen, not to win a
larger share of the existing stream._

When I read this it reminded me of the good things that Google does to make
the internet easier and faster. It's self-interested -- the better the
internet gets, the more people click on their ads -- but in an inclusive way:
there are auxiliary benefits that accrue to a lot of third parties (like me,
using Chrome right now). In YC's case, that would be the population of startup
founders and anyone who benefits from the startups they found.

I like it when companies behave this way. Maybe there are degrees of self-
interest and this is a more enlightened one. It's too much to expect companies
to do good things irrespective of their self-interest, but not too much to
expect the above, especially if it turns out that they end up making more
money this way. Then others will have a narrow and greedy reason to go down a
broader and more generous path.

Lest this seem like nothing much, it wasn't so long ago that people in this
position thought primarily in terms of controlling and crushing. The
difference may be one of degree, but it's not just rhetorical.

------
jakevoytko
_Using that heuristic, I'll predict a couple more things. One is that
investors will increasingly be unable to wait for startups to have "traction"
before they put in significant money._

To an outsider, this sounds like a small-scale version of the events that
caused the Dot-com bubble: Investors race to fund ever-shorter rounds of
companies that might someday be valuable, but have nothing right now but a
sales pitch and a website. This arrangement would benefit a company like
YCombinator, who seem to successfully fund companies based on little more than
gut feel. But taking away "success as a predictor of success" from the VCs'
playbook, would they have another strategy that beats random guessing? The
Dot-com bubble suggests "no." Hopefully the small average investment really
does turn the math on its head!

~~~
donaldc
This is why it will be important as an investor to actually _understand_ the
business area that the startup is getting into. The problem with the dotcom
bubble wasn't that there was pressure for investors to make a decision; the
problem was that many investors put in their money without any clue as to even
what the companies they were investing in actually did.

~~~
mattmanser
I think you miss the point, there's a massive gap between understanding a
market and successfully capturing it.

Regardless of a VCs understanding of it, if the founders can't capitalize on
it, but can talk the talk, it's gonna fail.

Some successful sales actually prove a basic level of competence. It also
shows the founders have a whole host of other skills, they can run a basic
company, have some sort of idea how to market let alone gain traction, there
really is a market for the product rather than vague projections, etc.

------
mattmanser
Is this not an echo chamber of 'we're doing this so everyone should'?

Has YC actually made a lot of money yet? I ask because the web does not
provide a definitive answer. I see a few YC companies doing well, but there's
no 100 million dollar companies there, let alone billion dollar companies.

Given that YC had to raise money last round to fund companies, one wonders.

I have a lot of respect for pg and read everything he writes, but I'm asking
out interest in the actual reality of the situation, it's hard to tell.

~~~
pg
Our stock in the startups we've funded is worth a lot on paper. I've never
tried to calculate how much. But I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. the Dropbox
stock alone is worth more than we've invested to date.

The reason we raised money is that we've only been doing YC for 5 years
(during the first of which we only funded 8 companies), and big exits usually
take longer than that.

~~~
ivankirigin
If you got a huge return from an early investment would you decline to raise
another round and continue with your own funds?

------
mattmaroon
I don't think it's fair to say the invaders usually win. In hindsight they
appear to, because you don't remember the 10,000 startups that tried and
failed for each one that succeeded. Broadcast.com was an invader in the same
space as YouTube.

A big business would die of schizophrenia if they tried to fend off everything
that attempted to disrupt them.

That's tangential to the point of the article though I suppose.

~~~
philh
"Invaders" here is plural, and that's important. broadcast.com and youtube
were on the same "side" of that particular battle. The invaders won,
broadcast.com just doesn't benefit from that.

~~~
mattmaroon
a) no because Yahoo shareholders sure don't feel like they've been on the
winning side of that battle. Their investment in broadcast.com netted them -$3
billion.

b) that doesn't change the hindsight bias at all, it just shifts it from
individual companies to individual industries. For instance the invaders in
grocery retail have done very little.

~~~
cwp
a) The point here is not that _all_ the invaders win, just that the companies
that do win tend to be invaders rather than incumbents. If Hulu loses to
YouTube, the fact that broadcast.com didn't amount to much is scant
consolation.

b) Grocery retail is an established market. PG was talking about new markets:
"The pattern here seems the same one we see when startups and established
companies enter a new market."

~~~
mattmaroon
a) no, once again, that's just an observational bias. You are thinking of the
industries where the invaders win because you don't hear about the others.
Invaders usually lose and are forgotten, but occasionally win and are
remembered.

b) you're not an invader if it's in a new market. you're more of a pioneer
then.

~~~
cwp
a) Yeah, that could be. Even if we limit discussion to the software/internet
space, we could be ignoring all the small companies that created a new market
then got crushed by Microsoft.

b) <shrug> PG chose the term, not me. The point is that you have a startup and
an established company competing in a market that recently didn't exist. PG's
point was that very often the startup wins. He may be wrong, but grocery
retail is not a counter example.

------
mlapeter
If you take PG's essay one step further, it would seem there might also be a
need for micro-investing in the same style that Kiva does micro-loans.
Something that lets small fish invest in startups that need less than, say,
$250k. Investments could have a lower limit of $5k for example, and most
software startups might only need 10 or 20 investors at $5k a piece.

Diaspora received a great deal of funding on Kickstart, but Kickstart
specifically says it is not meant for investing. I think there might be a
niche between well-connected, wealthy angels and simply asking family and
friends for seed money. This would also alleviate the choice between risking
your relationships with all your friends and family just to generate seed
money. If you have a business idea, there should be an option to raise money
in an open market at any scale.

~~~
philwelch
I think that's illegal--offering equity investment in small amounts to members
of the public is legally a public offering of stock, which falls under the
jurisdiction of lots of ugly federal regulations.

Angels exist because there's a big legal distinction between offering stock to
ordinary people and offering stock to millionaires.

~~~
mlapeter
Thanks for pointing that out Phil. I'm not a lawyer, but I wouldn't call it
illegal outright, as you say it may just require a fair amount of upfront
legwork to arrange the structure of the service in a legal way. There do seem
to be some exceptions the SEC offers, such as the below from their site. I
agree it may be impossible to make it work after jumping through all the
hoops, but if you succeeded all that red tape would make a decent barrier to
entry for others.

From <http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/qasbsec.htm#eod6>

"Section 3(b) of the Securities Act authorizes the SEC to exempt from
registration small securities offerings. By this authority, we created
Regulation A, an exemption for public offerings not exceeding $5 million in
any 12-month period. If you choose to rely on this exemption, your company
must file an offering statement, consisting of a notification, offering
circular, and exhibits, with the SEC for review. Regulation A offerings share
many characteristics with registered offerings. For example, you must provide
purchasers with an offering circular that is similar in content to a
prospectus. Like registered offerings, the securities can be offered publicly
and are not "restricted," meaning they are freely tradeable in the secondary
market after the offering."

Also: <http://www.sec.gov/answers/regd.htm>

------
inmygarage
"Much of the stress comes from dealing with investors."

Disagree here. Dealing with investors is a source of stress, but there are
many reasons why startups are stressful. A friend put it this way: "As a
startup founder, every day you're eating glass and staring into the abyss."

There is the stress of product-market fit, dealing with the fact that no one
knows who you are or cares, endless hours, etc.

But the best startup founders, I think, do it because they simply can't do
anything else.

While I hope that fundraising becoming more efficient will help create more
great startups - I think the battle against cushy jobs at established
companies is at the very, very beginning.

~~~
gfodor
When you need the money, the stress from investors rises to the top.

------
joshu
Oops. I was supposed to review this but ended up being too busy fundraising.

------
barrydahlberg
_Investors don't like trying to predict which startups will succeed, but
increasingly they'll have to._

I'm puzzled because I thought investing successfully was all about doing
exactly this.

~~~
pg
I used to think that too when I was a founder, but currently, at least, most
VCs and many angels tend to wait till they see a startup starting to take off,
if they can. This works just as well as predicting, so long as they jump in
before other investors.

------
maxklein
Business has traditionally not needed outside funding. Funding has mostly come
from revenue or from family. This angel/small scale investment is only
neccessary because technology is changing so quickly and there are many
opportunities at the moment. But this will end soon enough and the market will
stabilize.

The few new things that startup then will not be worth having a lot of angels
for.

~~~
pg
That's false. Medieval trading voyages, which comprised a large part of
economic activity at the time, were frequently paid for with investor money.
Since the industrial revolution most new industries have been.

More things surely would have before, but there was no way for investors to
ensure they weren't cheated by the managers skimming the profits. The reason
venture funding worked for trading voyages was that when the ship returned, it
was very hard to conceal what was in it.

The way railroads ensured that investors got paid was to fund themselves with
bonds that paid a fixed rate. Managers were free to do what they wanted with
the cash flow, but if they failed to make their bond payments they'd be in
default.

~~~
maxklein
Big and risky business has always been paid for by big money. Trading voyages
were big business and were limited in the number available. There were not
millions of ships setting sail everyday.

The risk and cost factor in websites is rapidly reducing. As the risk reduces,
so will the need to go to people dedicated towards giving money. It will be
easier to raise money locally and in your environment, as has been done for a
long time.

In human society, it's my observation that there are two types of capital
being raised:

\-- Risky and big money: These is the type of money that gets raised from
venture capitalists nowadays and from rich dudes back in the shipping days

\-- Less risky and smaller money: This type of money is raised from savings,
bank loans and borrowed from family.

Websites and many of these simple technology things are rapidly moving out of
the first category and into the second category. Cost is dropping and risk is
dropping. Things like robots or electric cars are now in the first category.

~~~
pg
The volume of shipping varied at different times, but it was always a huge
component of European economies. There were points in the preindustrial period
when several percent of English workers were on ships at any given time. The
percentage would have been higher in the Netherlands. And investing in
shipping was definitely not limited to the high and mighty; ships were rarely
owned outright, but were divided into shares, and I've read of shares as small
as 1/64 of a ship.

~~~
netcan
That makes sense.

The first companies issuing tradable stock were shipping/trading companies.
1/64th shares seems to be about the size that would start to require some more
sophistication.

------
thenbrent
What are people's thoughts on peer-to-peer startup funding? Is it ever going
to happen?

By that I mean raising money with a larger number of smaller inputs from a
marketplace or similar. Potentially still in exchange for equity though also
possibly for debt or just belief, as with Kickstarter.

Diaspora and Kickstarter are a recent successful example, though that was
something of a black swan event in my opinion.

I do think this type of exchange could solve some of the things founders
dislike about raising money, but it certainly raises other problems.

I heard a while ago of a company called Sprowtt planning to do something like
this, but researching again just now, they appear to have "hit the deadpool"
<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sprowtt-marketplace>

------
kylemathews
This is a question for pg and anyone else who can chip in:

I love the idea of a startup-controlled round and would definitely love to do
my first round (coming soon hopefully) this way but... how exactly do I go
about setting something like this up? Is there somewhere that explains how to
do this or do I have no recourse but retaining a lawyer who has experience
with this sort of deal (which I don't have the money for right now).

I'd love a nuts and bolts type answer if possible.

Or is this process even possible (yet) for a startup founder to lead?

~~~
gojomo
This recently-posted article has a lot of details:

<http://venturehacks.com/articles/no-lead>

If you're going to take 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars from private
investors, there's no getting around having a lawyer with experience in such
deals.

------
hristov
This is a great article, Paul. I have one question, if you do not mind setting
off on a tangent. You said that start-up investing is a seller's market now.
Why is that? In general "a sellers market" would indicate that there a lot of
investor money in comparison with startup opportunities.

Is it because there profitable exists which are bringing more money in? I have
been following the news and while the number of buyouts seem to be increasing,
many of them are at valuations which would not indicate much profit for the
investors.

Also VCs keep telling me that they have trouble getting funds as their
traditional institutional investors have soured on the VC investment class. So
that would indicate something other than a seller's market.

Or do you think that because there is so much activity with start-ups,
investors have already decided that some companies that have not yet reached
an exit (e.g., Twitter, Foursquare) are defacto winners, so that there is an
assumption of high profitability even without the exits.

Or do you think it is a sellers market because more money is going to silicon
valley now that many of the wall street profit making schemes have stopped
working.

Or is it possible that it only seems like a seller's market to you because
Y-combinator is so successful and popular that investing in Y-combinator
startups is indeed a seller's market, while this may not be the case overall.

~~~
iamelgringo
Running Hackers and Founders, I've come aross a ton of young founders that
have gotten seed rounds. And, a ton of them are hiring.

I think one reason for the trend is that a number of rich people have soured
on the idea of paying someone at BigCo finance to manage their money for them
in the stock market. A lot of portfolio's have recovered most of the losses
from the past 2 years of stock market craziness, and a lot of them are seeing
the benefit of diversifying their investments with angel investing.

Multiply that trend times 500 to 5000 millionaires in Silicon Valley, and you
have a sellers market in angel investing. That is, there are a lot of angel
investors looking for startups to invest in early.

------
ankeshk
So question: in a rolling close with convertible notes, what happens if the
startup neither gets a buy out offer nor raises another round of capital?

~~~
pg
In any startup, if there's never an exit, the investors lose their money.

~~~
ankeshk
Thanks. It could also happen that the startup doesn't require more capital and
is self sustaining. But doesn't get a buy out offer until after the
convertible notes expire. In which case, the investor doesn't get to enjoy in
the returns - he just gets his money back with some interest.

YC companies get a lot of publicity. And so their chances of raising another
round of capital or getting bought out are very good. This is not the case
with most startups. So a rolling close with convertible notes may not be the
best option from investor point of view - no?

(With an equity deal, the startup can get an exit until it goes out of
business. With a convertible notes deal, you have a fixed timeframe and you
(as an early stage investor) lose out if the exit happens beyond that time
period...

...So I thought one never did a convertible notes deal unless they knew there
was a very very good chance of an exit within the specified time frame... am I
missing something?

My point is - I don't see rolling closes with convertible notes getting too
popular with most angels.)

~~~
oomieboomie
The convertible note doesn't disappear. In the worst case it merely converts
to stock at a pre-configured valuation.

------
byrneseyeview
In a rolling round, is each investment negotiated at a different price? Or
does the company sell X shares at Y price, first-come, first-served? The
former sounds like a lot of work; the latter gives people an incentive to
delay even more (they'll have made an investment with more information than
the prior investors. And, of course, they'll have cash on hand in the
interim.)

~~~
ankeshk
Rolling round is done with convertible notes. No valuation talks take place.

Convertible notes are loans that can be converted into equity if some
predetermined event takes place (usually you raise another round of money or
you get a buy out offer.)

You're not selling X shares at Y price. You're issuing a loan that may get
converted into X shares. Every investor who gets these convertible notes
usually will end up getting the same valuation in the future if the note
converts to equity.

So with rolling round, you're just taking on debt. And you can take as much
debt as you want to (unless you've added a clause in any of the notes that
determines that you can't go over a certain amount of debt.)

~~~
Harj
_Rolling round is done with convertible notes. No valuation talks take place._

that's not true, most of the convertible notes we're seeing include a
valuation cap in them i.e. the investor never converts their debt at a
valuation higher than the cap. the cap addresses the main criticism of
convertible notes, namely they misalign the incentives of the founders (who
want a high valuation for their next funding event) and investors (who want a
lower valuation for the next round so they get more stock).

~~~
sachinag
I think it'd be great if YC published a standard note that has the cap (with
both a dollar and percentage) that accommodated rolling closes like y'all did
for the Series AA docs. Given that this is now the new hotness, it'd make seed
investing even more efficient, especially for startups outside the Valley who
may not have relationships with up-to-the-minute legal help.

~~~
pg
You're right; we'll do that.

------
revorad
OT: That's weird, I didn't see this and just posted a dup -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579024> \- but it didn't get caught. The
only difference seems to be in the www in the url.

~~~
icey
The dupe detection is a simple string comparison. Any character differences
will allow the dupe to be posted - even differences like trailing slashes.

------
eande
Some angel groups have some steep fees just to pitch and luckily there is
counter movement to that. I hope with the shift towards more angel investment
in the long run that this attitude of paying a high fee for presenting is not
getting to a norm.

~~~
pg
Don't worry, that custom is already so dead that I forgot to even mention it.
I don't think any YC-funded startup has ever paid to pitch one of these
groups.

------
phugoid
Could someone please guide me towards a "startup funding 101" resource that
explains what all this means? Ideally something that walks you through the
process instead of just defining the vocabulary. I've searched but I haven't
found anything good.

series A rounds, additional rounds of funding, fixed size rounds, convertible
notes, changes in valuation, stock dilution, etc.

~~~
revorad
<http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html>

------
harscoat
"it's usually the invaders who win." Let's aim, launch & invade!

------
daveungerer
May I suggest the use of the word archangel instead of super-angel?

------
noahlt
I think there's a missing word in this sentence: "What I'm saying is that the
kind of help that matters, you may not have to be a board member to give."

------
anamax
The essay makes sense as far as it goes, but if it's true, there's going to be
a change in both board of directors and advisors as well.

------
YiddishPolice
This sounds wonderful, but a bit too much wistful thinking.

------
jasonkester
I think that adding more VCs and Angels to the ecosystem would actually make
me less likely to consider raising money.

The first year of a startup can be incredibly cheap. Cheap enough that you
simply don't need _any_ outside cash to make it happen. For me, the only
reason I'd ever consider taking VC if for the side benefits that come along
with the money.

When you have an entity like YCombinator backing your thing, you get a huge
boost from their connections (and the fact that they're inclined to _use_
those connections for your benefit). That's orders of magnitude more valuable
than the lousy six grand they give you, and if I could get that help without
the money attached or the requirement to move to the bay area, I'd jump at it
for my latest project.

Now imagine the scenario with Random No-Name Angel with $100k to give you. All
you get out of that deal is money. No influence. No guaranteed TechCrunching,
no introductions to Important People, no Inc Magazine cover story about you
and the latest crop of young entrepreneurs. Unless you actually _need_ money
(which if you're smart, you shouldn't), there's just no advantage there.

