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There's a flip side to this: if you bootstrap an actually working business in a new industry and are "only" doubling each year, you run the risk of that industry getting noticed by VC who may lavish hundreds of millions on creating new competitors to pursue market share in that new industry. Your environment will get very tough very fast if you can't ride that out.

The result is race-to-the-bottom pricing as the "sales" teams "right at the start" that you're talking about are forced to sell unproven or worse non-existant technologies, promising 3 - 6 month take on times that turn out to be 18 months.

In the meantime, an established bootstrapped business trying to charge a working price for real delivery has trouble educating new early adopters in the industry why the promises of these well funded sales teams are unrealistic and why the pricing from these well funded startups is unsustainable. It's even harder once the industry matures a little and the well funded newcos actually can deliver at least some of what the customer needs. At that point it's frankly in customers' interests to be subsidized by the seller's VC money as long as the customer can handle the transition costs when their providers implode or are acquired out from under them.

Put another way, even if your goal is to build a solid working business, if your industry is new enough and big enough, you too need to pursue funding as a defensive strategy so you too can subsidize new client market share just to keep up when new money piles into your vertical. Ideally you need to get that funding before you have enough merely organic growth track record under your belt that VC won't believe you'd know how to execute a hockey stick growth curve with their money.

That said, taking VC money doesn't mean you have to climb on the "go big till you exit or die" train. You can operate a profitable business based on fundamentals, as long as you keep brutally honest track of what your business would look like if you have to turn off the pursuit of market share spigot. Make sure the resources you're using for growth are flexible commitments you can unwind if you have to shift back to self-funded operations, and make sure you have a base of solid loyal customers sufficiently profitable to cover any financing carry costs while still growing organically.

So.. take VC money so that it doesn't go to potential weak competitors, who will just add noise and uncertainty to the market?

Successfully raising capital is pretty much always seen as a win

This is the wrong mindset, people often think that raising capital from investors is win, it's not; raising capital does not mean a company will be successful. Raising Capital is one of the steps a company can use to help them win - by using that capital to build a profitable business and/or a successful exit & only then can it be considered a win.

> It surprises me is that investors put money into teams of hugely technical people who can't sell the amazing tech they can build and yet don't insist that they expand the team to bring in people who _can_ sell right at the start. It's often almost an afterthought, something that can happen later once the product is "finished".

I disagree.

- Selling from start is difficult (even for good sales people). There isn't any thing to sale at the beginning.

- Building from start is essential.

- Resources are finite for a startup. Good people (Sales, tech both) costs decent amount (equity or $$$)

VC expect founder(s)/CEO to take care of early stage of sales/marketing/advertising etc. till the time scaling on these operations is required. To me it makes sense to avoid (expensive) hiring unless absolutely required, especially in the early days of a startup.

I don't think we're disagreeing. I'm saying that there needs to be someone in the business very early on who understands sales and marketing and can use that knowledge to input on the product to make it something that will sell, and to build a profile in the media that gets people talking about the product even before it's available, and then when the product is at a sellable stage take it out there and sell it. Without those things the company is very unlikely to succeed. Ideally that's one of the founders, but if none of the founders have the ability to do that then there needs to be someone else added to the team to bring those skills. Many startups fail because they don't realise early enough. My first certainly did.

I would add that someone on the early team needs to be "getting out of the building," to use the appropriate lingo, and doing customer development. This is time consuming, non-scaling, shoe leather work. Ideally, yes, this person should be the founder, or at least a founder. But oftentimes, founders are too enamored of their ideas and their early visions to solicit and absorb honest feedback. They rationalize criticisms, or solicit feedback only from friends and industry connections.

This is a surprisingly common, and extremely easy trap to fall into.

I'm not saying the hypothetical founder needs a sales and/or marketing person on Day One, but he should recognize his strengths and weaknesses, and hire to supplement the latter.

...a group of professionals have examined you, your team, and your idea and decided that it's worthwhile risking a sum of money backing you...

You could make a similar case for mortgage approvals before the financial crisis.