You make some good points, but your analysis would be stronger if you compared apples to apples. By your own admission, you are bootstrapped. This conversation is about venture funded companies. A VC's business model is dramatically different from your model in investing in your own company - VCs rely on outliers which can achieve truly massive exits and 20+x returns. Outlier companies will do outlier things, perhaps to achieve outlier-esque growth, or perhaps merely to signal that they could be outliers...
The dollar bills on Sand Hill Road don't have magical properties. When a venture firm invests in your company, it adds cash to your balance sheet. Nothing more, nothing less. Spend that cash too quickly, invest it in the wrong things or don't get far enough with it and you're eventually going to die unless you find another source of cash.
And that's where we have a problem: the crazy burn rates you see in venture-backed startup land are based in large part on the fact that founders are by and large taking for granted their ability to raise more capital.
Just look at the OP's company: it's burning $150-200,000 every month despite the fact that it couldn't raise a traditional Series A and instead had to cobble together $2 million from "4 institutional investors and dozens of angels." The OP spins this as an "unconventional second seed round" but if and when she has to go back to the feeding trough, she shouldn't be surprised to find that many investors will treat her company like a Series B prospect subject to a much, much higher bar.
Bottom line: raising venture capital in and of itself doesn't make you an outlier and no founder should run his or her company like it's an outlier until there is demonstrable proof it is one.
The arguments are beyond asinine, but they happen. Consider leasing an office in San Francisco - how many venture funded companies lease space assuming that their headcount will grow exponentially? Actual exponential growth in staff count is relatively uncommon, but the assumption of exponential growth leads too many companies to pay for empty space. This is stupid and results in many potentially strong companies failing miserably, but these sorts of assumptions actually happen.
This is very true. I would argue that no founder should ever run their company like an outlier as the risks this induces are far greater than any reward. The hedonistic value of money decays at an amazing rate.
