Founders are worried about losing to competitors who raised more money. In actuality I’ve only seen counter-examples:

Tensor beat magic Eden with 2 orders of mag less $.

Solana beat other L1s with 2 order of mag less.

Jupiter raised 0, all VCs passed.

Less money = more sense of urgency more chip on the shoulder.

Only major example I can think of is Chewy muscling out their bootstrapped competitor

This mainly on the basis of using paid ads vs SEO and organic traffic

More cases of the reverse like with Airbnb and Wimdu in Europe