Two: It's not as simple as just throwing money at a bunch of random things and hoping one sticks. They work hard to invest in companies they think will make large returns, knowing that despite their best efforts a large portion likely won't. This is intuitively understood. But this more nuanced understanding leads to the conclusion that "[w]e have $375M from SoftBank" is meaningful because they're a successful entity in that space, with subject matter experts, and if they invest in you it indicates you're doing something right.
There's always tradeoffs. You seem to think that no VC money is safer, but that not necessarily true.
Without capital, you spend 10 years finding out that your bootstrapped robot pizza company is in fact utter garbage. With capital, that would have taken 2 years.
> that's not your investor's model
And it's not my customer's model either. Or my employee's model.
Just because we don't all have the same exact goals doesn't mean we can't create a mutually beneficial arrangement for all parties.
I mean, that's one possibility. The other is that without capital, everyone looks at your robot pizza company and says "There's no way that's going to work" and you find out in 0 years and you go work on something else, like a normal pizza company (or a normal office-leasing company, or a normal blood-testing company, or a normal juice press, or whatever). My worry is that if a founder goes to a venture capitalist with an idea that's probably bonkers but might work, the VC's interest is in making the idea even more bonkers and saying "No way, man, you're gonna change the world" and not "Hey, here's how to make your idea a little more grounded so you actually deliver something successfully."
I guess it depends on what you want as a founder. If you want the best shot ever at making your world-changing robot pizza company work, sure, go for the VC - if you bootstrapped it, you'd spend 10 years worrying it wasn't taking off because you didn't have the resources. If you want to succeed at something, and you're okay with succeeding even if there aren't pizza robots on every corner, find a route where you're not working for mega-growth-or-bust. (Which could include modest amounts of venture capital! Or could include loans or whatever.) And honestly, if you really care about pizza robots and it doesn't matter to you how many pizza robots there are as long as you can work on pizza robots for ten years... bootstrap.
> Just because we don't all have the same exact goals doesn't mean we can't create a mutually beneficial arrangement for all parties.
My concern here is that it's in the VC's interest for you to be more ambitious and fail instead of staying cautious and succeeding. Nobody else has that in their goals. No (actual, paying) customer would say "Your product is great, but if you can't add these features, we'd prefer it if your product didn't exist." No (current) employee would say "I love this company, but if we can't hire ten times as many people, I want to be laid off." Everyone else has an interest in you staying afloat and alive, even if they have different opinions on what you do.
The VC's interest is for a very high-worth company.
The customers interest is you providing them an good product/service at low cost.
The employees interest is you providing a paycheck.
All of these are willing to compromise your profitability or risk goals.
Fortunately, even diverging goals can be managed to be cooperative. And this happens over and over again in business.
One, if that's really the model, then founders had better stay as far away from venture capital as possible. Whether your motivation is "change the world"/"deliver on the vision you have" or "make money," that's not your investor's model. Your investor's model is to convince you and a hundred people like you that each of you is special and going to change the world, while expecting only one of you to succeed. Your investor's model is to push you to be Uber-scale even if you're overextending yourself and to convince you that you can do it even if you probably can't, because it's better to let you fail and cut you loose than to let you have a modest and small success that doesn't make a dent in the portfolio. If you and everyone else is aiming for safe successes instead of high-risk-high-reward gambles, then the let-a-thousand-startups-bloom approach stops being profitable for the investor, so investors can't let that happen.
Two, I think the rest of the world - and perhaps even the industry itself - doesn't quite intuitively understand that. If that's really the model, "We have $375M from SoftBank" isn't an indicator of anything, neither to other investors nor to potential employees.