>> I personally think it’s better to struggle early on than to give away money like candies to founders

I agree, and disagree. My business was bootstraped, we never took outside investment, and it succeeded and makes money. It employs 50 odd people and is a big fish in a fairly small pond.

We make the world better for a few thousand people (customers).

But our approach couldn't lead to a Facebook, or Amazon or Uber etc. Products like that work best once they achieve scale, and achieving scale is expensive. But Uber (goes example) works poorly with 50 drivers in 1 city.

For most businesses and most founders, more is achieved with less. Most businesses don't need scale to be effective.

But equally, the VC approach is necessary for some subset of problems.

You want to sell that equity to create a loss? If it’s worth zero, I’m happy to go through the exercise if it’s marketable. This offer is only good if it’s actually worthless and I’m not stiffing you on the value.