I feel fortunate to work at a company that hasn't had any debt since the 80s and keeps a good stockpile of funds. Consequently they didn't have to lay off anyone in 2008 and even the current crisis didn't delay our plans to build an addition to the office.
There’s a lot of survivorship bias to stories like this — and a lot of unobservable opportunity costs. Could the company have grown faster if it had invested its resources to the max and leaned on external funding? Could it have become king ape in a related winner takes it all market?
