As for your static IP address example... a company that is serving 38 pages a seconds with 3 ads and a $1 CPM isn't exactly a trivial thing to build. If you do build that without taking any investment, good for you! You've bootstrapped your company. I imagine you'll find that you need a lot more than a static IP address and 15 Mbps upload bandwidth to get there though.
"an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model"
I've read that some dozens of times from Blank.
Sounds like a guy opening a pizza shop knows better what he's doing than the IT startups Blank is talking about!
Not all IT startups have to be less well directed than a pizza shop! Bluntly, for a well planned startup, I conclude that Blank is nearly always wrong.
I helped start a company, now world famous. In my offer letter I was promised stock. Later the COB said that the amount would be $500,000. I never got the stock. That stock would be worth about $500 million now. Yup, I missed out. But I did get some startup experience. Got'a tell you, what Blank said didn't describe what we were doing at all. We always knew JUST what our business model was, and we were correct from the beginning to the present. It wasn't tough to know. Sometimes Blank is seriously wrong.
"You've bootstrapped your company." From what PG wrote, sounds like I don't have much choice: No matter what "more" it takes, I have to have it done before a VC will write a check. But, then, as you said, I will already have "bootstrapped" my company.
"I imagine you'll find that you need a lot more than a static IP address and 15 Mbps upload bandwidth to get there though." Sure. The point about the static IP address and the 15 Mbps upload bandwidth was just to illustrate that by the time I've got the "more" done and am ready to go live, we're not talking bucks big enough to eat up an average Series A. Instead we're talking much less cash that it would take to keep a new pizza shop going for the first week.
My point isn't how much an entrepreneur needs to do. My point is that by the time the entrepreneur has gone live, gotten significant traction, and has the traction going, and, thus, qualified for VC funding, if he can half fill 15 Mbps upload bandwidth, then he won't want to take VC money.
Put more simply, PG is saying that the VCs want to get on the plane after it has already left the ground. Okay by me. I'm just trying to understand the rules of the game.
I didn't mention it, but my guess is that the severe rules PG is describing have been 'suggested' by the LPs.
The difference between a restaurant and a technology startup is that a startup is "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model" - http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...
As for your static IP address example... a company that is serving 38 pages a seconds with 3 ads and a $1 CPM isn't exactly a trivial thing to build. If you do build that without taking any investment, good for you! You've bootstrapped your company. I imagine you'll find that you need a lot more than a static IP address and 15 Mbps upload bandwidth to get there though.