Hmm. Let's see. We're AirBnB. After 4 months of bootstrapping by selling Obama-O's, do we take $20K from YC? Of course! It's YC, and we can still bootstrap if we want. After a few more months, do we take $600K from Sequoia and another firm, and let rapacious VCs into our tent? Well, we're hungry because the Obama-O's ran out, so OK. The next year, do we let Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher(!) and others give us $7.2M more? Tough decision--we can control everything and have a nice, small business like--what was that highly successful company? Carbonmade--and bring in $1M in revenues a year, 100% ours, or give up a third of the business for seven times that. What to do, what to do? We cave in to The Man and take the $7.2M. What, you seriously wouldn't want to hang with Ashton and Demi? Another year goes by and Mark Andreessen and Jeff Bezos want to join in with a crazy Russian and give us $112 million for another 10%. No way! This kind of offer insults our bootstrapping dignity. Besides, if we're highly successful like Carbonmade, we could make that much in 112 years on our own and keep 100% of it, after expenses. But we sell out anyway, at a billion-dollar valuation. We might each get a few hundred million with a successful IPO, but it's just not worth it compared to the satisfaction we could have if we owned 100% of a million-dollar company. Paul Graham must be ashamed of us. We drown our sorrows in an apartment in Saint-Tropez that we rented through AirBnB with Ashton and Demi. Bruce Willis stops by to say, "What's with the sad face, boys?" He's not as tall as we expected. We give him a glass of absinthe. The Mediterranean sun is not unpleasant.
