If you are going to make financial players a dependency in your business plan you'll have to jump through similar kind of hoops.
On the other hand Thomas Edison figured out how to bootstrap his enterprises, maintain control and avoid dealing with this kind of nonsense.
This goes from the very top end of town to oblivion. Because, at the root of it is that gotcha.. money for nothing.. many know how the rest of that song goes.
If there were any other things you were unsure about before, could you please share them? I'm hoping something constructive comes out of this.
The time horizon for VCs is much shorter than that. If your idea is not working now, then you have very little chance of getting investment.
Someone with the intellect and having developed disruptive technologies similar to some of what Tesla patented could still easily score investors. I think whoever did this was partially right-on but mostly just pissed at the way things are. The fact is, money doesn't grow on trees. There has to be a filter, and that filter isn't perfect.