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tjomk | 3 years ago

Growth is not everything. I remember reading "Let my people go surfing" by the Patagonia founder where he mentioned multiple times that they were trying to artificially limit their growth by raising the prices for their products. You don't need to chace ever higher profits. Staying small and enjoying your life is also an option.

discuss

dublin|3 years ago

This is done in tech, too: Scott McNealy famously raised the already-high prices of the new UltraSPARC powered Suns in the 90s because CPU production capacity was limited, and the products were wildly more popular than the company's expectations.

Rather than be faced with angry customers who couldn't take delivery, the price hike made sure that only the customers who really wanted the Ultra tech would be in line for it anyway. (It also removed incentives for the channel to illicitly take those higher margin dollars, when Sun needed them to grow capacity...)

FWIW, I've done between a half dozen to a dozen startups, some bootstrapped, some VC, and I can tell you that with very few exceptions, VC money is best avoided, or at least pushed out as far as possible. The chances of NOT getting pushed out as a technical founder (especially if you want to significantly influence what gets built and why) are pretty slim, and yeah, nothing wears you down quite like having to fight for influence in a company YOU created. Just dont' go there, unless you're really willing to put others in full charge of your baby.

There is nothing wrong with owning and running your own privately held company the way you see fit. (I had lunch recently with a founder who declined VC money because of the reasonable fear that the VCs would make his company "woke" (they pressed to rainbow-logo in June when negotiating the term sheet.) Since both the founders are fundamentally philosophically and religiously opposed to that worldview and will not tolerate it, they passed up the millions in seed/A to continue to grow organically. The company may grow a bit more slowly, but it will be a much stronger company growing it in a way the founders can live with.)