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There are too many stories out there of highly successful people who got that way by going 'all in' on some rising technology.

This causes too many company executives to think 'if we go all in on [latest trend] then the same thing will happen to us'. Very little thought is given to whether the latest thing is a good fit for what you are building.

When it is a good fit, things can really work to your advantage. When it is not, it can just be a monkey on your back.

I came here to write this exact response.

Folks work in mission driven organizations. In organizations that are optimizing for dollars you see quality fall by the wayside.

Mission driven organizations that understand the levers of capital are the most enjoyable workplaces of my career.

You want a CEO who is customer obsessed, not a CEO who is maximizing for dollars in the bank at all costs.

It has to be mission first for a startup to be great, really for any critical endeavor.

Every for profit organization is optimizing for dollars, the next round of funding or to be an acquisition target. “Customer obsession” only goes as far as getting enough customers to be an attractive acquisition or another exit.

This might be a frame of reference issue. There are quite some small-medium businesses with a founder who is able to have more concerns in scope than "maximize dollars - screw it".

Has that founder taken outside funding? If so, it doesn’t matter what their belief system is.

I understand what you mean, but over here bootstrapping is the norm. Also funding can be boring loans from the bank, family loans, or business loans based on trust in the skills of the business owner.

So it doesn't always have to be an: you owe me the money, so I own you.

Exactly. Tech has become a place where “funding” has become synonymous with “find a VC to fund you”. Most businesses don’t go that route, and plenty of tech ones don’t either.

Savings, bank loans, lines of credit, private loans between people, local angel investors, and so on are how most businesses bootstrap.

I co-own a technology business that has never taken outside money (well, we do have a credit card) and I’m not really interested in doing that. I think VCs are more trouble than they’re worth because they’re so obsessed with growth that little else matters to them, and we’ve seen where that gets us in terms of customer relationships and product quality. And they always want just enough control to eventually oust executives they don’t agree with.

We’ve built our business up the old fashioned way: from a personal capital contribution from each co-founder and modeling pricing based on what the business needs. Clients who see value in that approach from their critical technology vendors are not impossible to find at all.

Without the runway of functionally blank checks, you do have to continually monitor your business model though.

Can you name one tech company of note that hasn’t gone that route? BaseCamp and who else?

Microsoft is listed often as example. Dell as well. Apple startet without VCs, but added one a bit later.

Microsoft and Apple were founded in the late 70s not exactly applicable in 2025 with a completely different landscape.

GitHub, MailChimp, stack overflow, craigslist, Zoho, pluralsight. Just ask an ai.

Or do you want to shift goal posts again?

And it's totally applicable right now given the recent collapse of VC funding.

Your qualifying statement is found some heavy lifting.

First 'tech company' is a very narrow band. There are lots of companies that were founded to leverage technology, but which do not consider themselves 'tech' companies. We're, for example a services business, the service we provide happens to use tech we developed.

Second "of note" is very subjective. Do you mean billions of users? Global brand name? Thousands of workers? Because those are very high capital outcomes achieved either via long time (IBM?) or massive capital injection (which leads to very financial motivations.)

Of course there are zillions of my smaller 'less notable' businesses that exist all around you and me. You've never heard of the company I work for, but we're well known in our domain in our market. We've never taken outside investment, and we're free to make a lot of 'discretionary spending' that often serves a purpose other than increasing dividends.

For example we pay low-end workers (non techies) substantially more than market rate (aka minimum wage) because we belive in 'living wage' principles. That directly reduces profits, which we can do because the owners care about many things, and money is just one of them.

Of course the business has to be a business. Of course it has to make money. But money is like blood. You need it to live, but you don't live to make blood.

Maybe it’s a PE backed company

To sum up what you said, some startups succeeded creating products and others did not, just like before LLMs. The majority of the failed ones are led by clueless CEOs trying to join the hype

> I've seen teams go for AI, do it well, and succeed.

Succeed based on what criteria? I struggle to think of a single product with "AI" that I'd call successful (excluding the already existing and established niches of recommendation algorithms and computer vision which have been rebranded AI and maybe are what you're referring to).

I'd guess "succeed" here == "VC gave them money".

You wouldn’t call ChatGPT a successful product?

It's not a "product that went for AI", the product itself is AI.

The difference becomes blurrier every day

"I've seen teams go for AI, do it well, and succeed"

Can you give any hints as far as industry or product?