Investment mega-rounds and high-growth entrepreneurs

I'll put it as simple as I can: Burning money doesn't make you a high growth entrepreneur; quite the contrary, most of the times it makes you a loser.

Recent news of the WeWork collapse just confirmed what had actually been evident with the case of Uber, Lyft and numerous other supposing ‘unicorns’ which basically compete in how fast they’ll burn investors’ money.

Other people’s money always burns better.

The purpose of an enterprise is to create economic value, not to destroy it.

For every business of course there’s an investment period, where costs will be there and revenues will be not. This period though has to be short enough and the corresponding investment has to be barely sufficient.

In essence this is what Lean Startup, Customer Development and Agile have been evangelizing for quite a while.

From this perspective, strange as it may sound, investment mega-rounds actually harm the essence of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship ecosystem stakeholders do have a responsibility to undertake. There’s little to celebrate in a large investment round; this should not be presented as an ‘objective’, but just as a means to reaching an end — which is no other than creating a sustainable, profitable business.