I have had 3 entrepreneurs speak with me about their fund raising strategy in the last 3 weeks, and I realize that the once great art of bootstrapping a startup (i.e. building a business on cash flow rather then venture money) has been lost. All 3 of these entrepreneurs had the opportunity to grow their companies off of cash flow alone. And while in many cases it makes sense to raise money to accelerate growth (e.g. you have product market fit and want to ramp like crazy to beat your competitors, build network effects, hire a crapload of sales people, etc.), these entrepreneurs’ reasons seemed way off to me: