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I'm not sure you can really separate them. Good founders pick their market carefully, and they also keep a very close eye on the market & industry dynamics when deciding when & whether to fundraise.

I know that I've decided not to fundraise until I have a pretty good idea who my market is and some proof points that they actually want my product, and I've chosen product ideas and target markets to make it feasible (if difficult, sigh) to test those assumptions without funding. Part of this is that I see my personal competitive advantages as technology & strategy, though, and I kinda suck at skills like hype and fundraising. Someone good at hoodwinking people like Elizabeth Holmes or Lucas Duplan might rationally choose to raise as much capital as possible first and then hire people to figure out the details ... but then again, it didn't exactly work out for either of them. (Actually, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are good examples of people for whom this strategy did work out - but they actually were not diluted all that much, because the data they took to investors was such that they were able to raise that capital on advantageous terms.)

Brian Chesky talks in some interviews about how they initially planned to grow AirBnB organically and take only as much capital as needed to stay alive, but foreign competition that copied their idea and raised hundreds of millions forced their hand. At that point it didn't matter much, though, because they already had a profitable business. Joel Spolsky has also written about the decision process:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2010/02/14/raising-money-for-...




I don't think jobs and bezos can be classified as the hoodwkinking type, if anything it should be the former. Jobs had Wozniak and they did have initial demand for their computer. Granted I don't know much about Amazon's early history but bezos came out of de shaw, in sure he knows his shit




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