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)