Full disclosure: I’m the head of engineering here, and I’ve been in the trenches during this whole thing. Our partnership did start with stars in our eyes. As Alex talks about in the post, there’s no hard feelings, but sometimes an opportunity that looks perfect for your company ends up being a major distraction and an expensive learning opportunity. I’ve personally been down both the VC route and the bootstrapped route before. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks, but when you're bootstrapped, these kind of misalignments hit just a little bit harder.