> If you only own 1% of your company after raising funds, you've made some serious mistakes along the way.

This was a simple example to illustrate a point. A more realistic example would be: owning 100% of a company making $1M/year is better than owning 40% of a company making $100M/year where investors put in $500M with a 4X liquidation preference. This case is even clearer here, but not quite as easy to parse.

Modern VCs allow founders to retain a large "percentage" of their company in stock or other ownership terms, but they use liquidation preferences and other mechanisms to effectively increase their financial leverage.

Better in terms of financial gains, sure. But in the ability of the business to have an impact on an industry, group of people or the world at large, the smaller business has infinitely less leverage.

Fundamentally these kind of comparisons are not really relevant. The $1 million/year business is not even in the same universe as the $1 billion/year one, nor are the motivations of the typical founders.

Bezos founded Amazon in a different era. It predates even Google. In fact, by the time Google was founded, Amazon has already IPOd. Back then the tech VC system was highly different. Bezos had to explain to early investors what the internet was. If you found a company now, you will be exposed to much different conditions.

Just an example. Again, if you raise money and end up with 1% of something that isn’t Apple/Google/etc., you made some serious mistakes along the way.

Wait a second... Half joke: Isn't being founder and running a company about making mistakes all the time, learning from them and hoping you avoided the really bad mistakes?

no joke: I wouldn't criticize someone who

1. Founded a company

2. Had the company under his or other people management go to 100m USD

3. Kept some equity, even 1%

“Mistake” is very clearly referring to the topic of retaining equity, with the assumption that more is better. I’m not criticizing the founder in general; e. g. Microsoft has made many mistakes in its history, but clearly Gates is immensely successful.

Obviously if giving up 99% is what enabled you to get to the 100m, then sure, it could be considered worth it. But if we look at virtually any startup with a high valuation, the founders always manage to maintain more than 1%.