It's a cliche, but it's true: investors want you to go big or go home. Their outcome is binary. The IRR they see gets killed if you take 15 years to exit instead of 5. As an entrepreneur, you may very well make life-changing money by riding it out and making your vision work eventually, but that's not how (most) (professional) investors measure success.

Which is why you should think long and hard before you raise money about whether you WANT to deal with that misalignment in your life.

No doubt, raising money is viewed as cool (viz. entreporn) and may ease your path in other ways, but it introduces certain physics to your business.

Nine, ten...the important consideration is the fallacy of assuming that increasing spend provides a commensurate yield in productivity and output.

The more appropriate analogy would have been Brooks's Mythical Man Month.

And I am not trying to be cute here. It is properly the single most common tradeoff here - you sell your hours for pay at a company, then buy a frozen pizza because you don't want to make it at home, then clean your own house because a maid is too expensive but outsource your taxes because they are so complex and would take you ten times longer to do, you drive a car because commuting by bike is too slow and the buses don't come by that often.

Time can be brought (heck that is kinda what you are doing with your start-up because a successful start-up can mean you don't have to work at a job again, ever).