I’m confused

If you have a profitable strategy that scales up, raise capital to execute on it. Doesn’t seem too hard.

What about bootstrapped companies? Basecamp technically took Bezos’ money, but pocketed it mostly. 1Password didn’t take “funding” until now, again, mostly to cash out.

Gumroad was scalable and makes a decent amount of money. It just wasn’t for the way the VCs wanted. So it didn’t work out that way, but the founder was still making mid 6 figures.

if you had a machine that could profitably pick stocks why would you ever invest just your money (not a lot) vs other people’s money (could be infinite if your strategy scales)