Startup fundraising is broken.

When you ask most entrepreneurs what they want, you'll get something like "build a great company", "make good money", "make the world better" and "have the freedom to work on what I like".

I ask them, would a $100 million company make you happy? The answer is often yes.

If I ask them, would you trade that for a significantly smaller chance of it becoming a $10bn company? the answer is most frequently no.

For most entrepreneurs, a 100mn company is already a great company, freedom, positive impact, and great money. Taking additional risk and making extra compromises to get a chance to go to 10bn is just not appealing for most. It's not about talent or ambition, I'm talking here about talented founders, many of whom go to create solid companies.

Social System Designer - decentralised governance and organisation design nerd.

Instigator at RnDAO.io, co-lead at TogetherCrew.com

Note that a $100M company is likely doing $10M/yr in revenue.  Most first-time startup founders don’t realize this either.

I find if I ask them to describe the company (ie number of people, how much money they make, etc), they usually end up at a $10M/yr business.

VC has turned into the only route that founders consider, but grant/bootstrap/angel are also options