Stack Overflow founder Joel Spolsky explains the biggest problem with raising venture capital

There's a lot of stresses that open up when you raise venture capital where there becomes a misalignment between the founders and the vc. Yeah, take us through this. So I think the biggest problem is that essentially a vc, and they'll tell you this has got a portfolio of companies that they're investing in and they want to see big bets because essentially they only need one or two of the companies in their portfolio to really succeed big. But they also need them to strive for that billion dollar exit. Normally you kind of hope for maybe one or two to return the portfolio and then maybe three, four that, you know, sort of make some profit and the rest of them just sort of die. You don't really care. And you can't have a bunch of cautious entrepreneurs that are kind of locking in small gains, which is what an individual entrepreneur will tend to want to do is try to say, oh, wow, I got, I figured out a way to make this a $5 million a year business and I can keep all 5 million of those dollars. This is amazing. I'm stopping. Right. And that sounds like a much better outcome than a one in a thousand chance of, boom, I got a billion dollars and I'm out of here. But the investor wants you to take that, that one in a million chance. Right. So that's sort of the first problem that you immediately have. The stakeholders in Stack Overflow, all of us sort of thought, saw this as, you know, we got to go big or go home. Anyway, that's the way we saw. Right. So you were aligned in the, in that way. Yes. And we also had kind of a backup plan. Right. Like, I've still got Fox Creek soccer going on on the side. Right. Does that add negative to the VC that you have this other business that can pay your rent? Some of the VCs thought it was because I hadn't burned sufficient bridges or they thought I would be distracted and they're kicking themselves for not investing.