"Never" is far too strong a word here. There's more to the startup world than SaaS.

Good luck launching a consumer hardware product without raising money if you're not independently wealthy. Even getting a relatively simple product to mass production is going to take on the order of 12-18 months and 1-2 million: you've got several iterations of prototyping and testing, UL/IEC approvals, set-up at a CM, and the long tail of retail to deal with. If you have something truly innovative, consider adding an order of magnitude to that cost estimate.

Quite a few companies have gone down the crypto ICO route to raise funds instead of dealing with traditional investors / VCs, which I think is a great (albeit unregulated) way to raise some money without giving out a huge chunk of your company. It's also an easier way to raise money without having an actual product in hand.

It's just unfortunate though that ICOs have a bad rep due to greed and the fact that a lot of the ICOs that happen are scams and will never deliver an actual product.

"If you take money too early (and give away a lot of equity), it turns off future investors"

That's dependent on who the early investor is. If you sell 1/3 of your company before product launch, to one of the most respected people in the segment in question, you'll lure talent and capital to your shores.

A prominent early investor lends vast, instant credibility to what you're doing. They share their reputation with you.

Doing a genetics or CRISPR start-up? Sell 1/4 of the pre-product company to George Church and Feng Zhang, get them to be involved in any meaningful manner, and see what happens.

Convince Mark Cuban to buy 20% of your pre-product company. Your profile just instantly skyrocketed. Every media outlet in the US will now take your contact and at least listen to your story. Cuban just lent you a tiny piece of his fame and credibility, other major investors will (under most circumstances) immediately take you more seriously. A similar story would play out with a few dozen other big angel investors (with varying degrees of attention & credibility attached, some investors lend more or less of each).

>When you are first building your platform or product, you need to focus on a couple of things: The technology, putting together a great team, user acquisition and gaining traction, and hopefully earning revenue as well.

>Once you have all four of these things, you will be in a much better negotiating position when it’s time to talk to investors about raising a round of funding.

until of course seeing your product, revenue and traction would only worsen the impression :) Watching how some acquaintances have been showered with money (investors have been borderline begging to get in, and they were right - one is already a unicorn in just a few years with strong revenue and pile of cash in bank) just upon starting i can't even imagine how a better deal is possible :)

Though it is B2B where to make a Fortune 500 sale in the 1st/2nd year, you have to start selling well in advance, just from the get go, well before MVP(if MVP even makes sense at all, instead there is POC)and you can't do that on a shoestring budget. Development too must be scaled pretty quickly to be able to deliver of what was already sold. There is no time to find a business model, for market exploration, etc. typical B2C startup staff. The people here come with experience, they know the field, know what they want to do.

I would do a small friends & family round pre-revenue. E.g., 8 friends and family @ 12.5K each = 100K. I don't mind if my success makes my friends & family some money.

But I'll sure feel bad if I take their money and lose everything. Perhaps that would be motivating...

(Note: where I live (BC, Canada), the provincial government offers a refundable 30% tax credit for investments like this, so if I did lose everything, friends & family would only be out 70K).

>>You should always focus on building your platform and proving that you can get customers before taking in any money. This way, when you do raise money, you’ll be using it to scale your company, not build it.

Great in theory. But who pays my rent, health care and sandwiches for those years? I get that married people with children shouldn't even try. Kids get in the way of working like a slave

While overly sensationalist and click-batish the amount of people I talk with who raise money before they build their base product in areas that do not require capital or aren't hard problems to solve is quite staggering.

But I am fine with people doing that as it means mostly they won't succeed.

Nobody seems to have told Magic Leap.

This is a problem elsewhere. For example in Colombia (where I live) is common for "investors" to ask for more than 50% of your company and become de facto owners.

Here, a lot of people can't even think in build a startup because lack of cash and troubles getting bank loans.

A small investment (for example US 10.000) could lift some of us from the ground! but the investors here are not savvy enough to spread the money among many and reap the profits :(

"Why you should never raise money on bad terms" is really the point of the article.

Curious if anyone has experience with this. If you did build a product first, are there cases when having said product can actually harm raising money?

"It takes money to grow money, not make money."

This advice may make sense if you're either independently wealthy, or young enough and unencumbered enough with life's obligations that you can afford to work for a year or two without a salary.

Actually, I think Silicon Valley uses this as a bit of a filter. It filters for people with a background and social network where a couple hundred thousand dollars, or working for a year or two without pay, are not a big deal.

Exercise for the reader: what cohort of people does this filter exclude?

A MVP does not take a couple hundred thousand dollars or years without pay. Many people here on HN have built apps and gotten traction in their free time.

The real trick is getting a job where your contract does not try to claim your employer owns things you make in your free time...

I'm currently building an ML-powered debugging tool for automatically correcting code based on error messages. It's actually fairly difficult but doable, and we are working towards getting our first product out in the next few months. It has been difficult supporting ourselves during this phase however since we are both from middle class backgrounds and didn't go to prestigious schools. For years I thought I was smart for turning down Princeton and taking a scholarship to a state school and not having any student loan debt. Now for the first time I see the other side of that decision and think about the connections I could have been making during college and how much easier our current road would be. That early friends-and-family money is really important in getting yourself to a state where seed funding is interested in you.

>what cohort of people does this filter exclude?

People unlikely to have the connections and social capital required to get future rounds of funding.

There are many venture capital filters that are Keynesian beauty contests like this. Venture capitalists aren't optimizing for funding financially sound businesses. They're optimizing for funding in round N companies that they believe have a good enough chance to get funded in round N+1, and so forth.