Tweeted this in January and it's only gotten more true.
Two years ago you needed a team and a runway to ship anything credible. Today one person with Claude Code ships ten PRs a day. The technical work that used to take a seed round takes a week. So what does the seed round actually buy you.
It buys runway to hire people who would otherwise have been you. A board that wants you to scale before you have a thing to scale. A clock that started the day the wire hit. A story you now owe other people.
Bootstrapping buys the ability to change your mind on Tuesday. A price-of-being-wrong measured in days, not quarters. Nobody in your inbox asking what the plan is. The option to ship something small that works before something big that's planned.
The first set destroys the second. Funded founders pretend they still have optionality. They don't. They have momentum, which is the opposite.
The hard part isn't the code, it's distribution. Funded competitors have the same problem, and worse, because they have to perform certainty to investors while they figure it out. That makes them slower than the bootstrapper next door who can change positioning on a Wednesday afternoon. A bootstrapper writes a wrong landing page on Monday, throws it away on Tuesday, ships a new one Tuesday night, and looks at the numbers Wednesday morning. A funded company schedules a positioning workshop for next quarter.
When to take money. When you've found the thing. When the unit economics are obvious. When capital compounds the work you're already doing. Until then, money is a substitute for the iteration speed you'd lose by taking it.
Most founders raise too early because the technical work feels overwhelming. AI fixed that. The cheap part is no longer the constraint. The expensive part is being wrong slowly.
Don't sell the cheap option to fund the expensive habit.
— Simon