I'm sympathetic to this argument, but the "long term" could easily be quite long on the timescale of a startup's solvency. FogBugz, for example, might well not have survived without the initial user base provided by the readers of Joel on Software. Having that promotion channel could easily have meant a factor of ten in the initial customer base compared to a "normal" startup. And that factor of ten represents more than three years of growth even if you double your users each year. Of course, with growth like that presumably you could raise money to increase your runway, but that adds the complexity of dealing with investors and adds more time for things to go wrong.
i'm having difficulty imagining a bug tracking? software having viral growth ... so i guess the 'interest rate' is steadily low; therefore, initial capital is important
Bug tracking software, like other tools for programmers, often travels as a virus with team members. You hire some guy, he says "why are you using this horrible crap we used fogbugz at my last job and it wuz not teh suck", and so you try it.
Maybe we can call this resume-viral: products that are passed around by virtue of become recognizable bullet items on resumes.
