Venture capital as founders imagine it does not exist.
It’s a mask. A mirage.
Venture capitalists call themselves risk takers. They’re not.
They risk on paper. You risk with blood.
You risk your rent, your marriage, your body.
By the time they commit, you’ve already survived without them.
That’s the paradox.
The drain
We jumped every hoop.
Crafted decks. Made projections. Answered endless due diligence questions.
Each pitch deck, every follow-up call, each week lost to “due diligence” drained the oxygen we needed to build.
VCs don’t fund you to build.
They wait until you’ve already built.
They wait until risk has been burned off your skin.
They wait until you’ve proven you don’t need them anymore.
And when they show up, they call it vision.
It’s not vision. It’s hindsight.
A few fund the chaos at day zero. Keep them. This isn’t about them.
The raw truth
The real capital was never them.
It was what you gave in the dark when no one was looking.
The late nights.
The sleepless weeks.
The humiliation of failure, swallowed in silence.
The rage swallowed when another gatekeeper wasted another month.
Or the moment you gave more than you had to give,
not for glory,
not for ego,
but to keep the lights on.
To bring it across the line.
That’s venture.
That’s risk.
That’s capital.
The Real Sources
Money is not scarce. Energy is.
Stop wasting it on VCs.
Fund yourself through:
- Rollout. Launch fast, sell sooner than feels safe. Every dollar in is your Series A.
- Customers. They don’t just validate you. They bankroll you. If they pay, you live.
- Believers. The three people who wire money before the model works. Not because of term sheets. Because of faith.
- Blood. Yours. Sweat, hours, sanity, body.
That’s the seed.
That’s the bridge.
That’s the series everything.
The lesson
Don’t confuse capital with capitalists.
Don’t confuse risk with tourists.
You are the risk.
You are the capital.
By the time they finally say yes,
you will have built the thing without them.
And you’ll look back and realise:
They weren’t the venture.
You were.
All along.
