most venture-backed companies end up in the same place: raised 3-4M seed (or 10-15M series A) built real product got to 300-500K ARR (or 2-3M ARR) VCs stopped caring founders stuck with high pref stack, can't raise more, can't exit, can't even shut down cleanly these aren't bad businesses they're just wrong cap tables the companies could throw off 500K-1M in profit annually hire 2-3 more people and grow to 2-3M ARR actually build something valuable but they're trapped in venture math that doesn't work anymore the discourse only covers two outcomes: unicorn or failure nobody talks about the third path: decent business, wrong structure thousands of quality founders stuck running companies VCs wrote off not because they're bad operators because they picked wrong market size or wrong cofounder or raised too early

Heard a true horror story from a gentleman who today manages a great eight-figure portfolio, but he said that if he had bought just one company and given it all his attention, rather than hiring a buy-side broker to build deal flow to buy next 2 bizs he would be back at his 9-5.