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David Holz had already done the VC thing.
His last company, Leap Motion, raised over $100 million. Big names. Big checks. Big expectations. It didn't end the way anyone hoped.
So when he started Midjourney in 2021, he made a different choice. No pitch decks. No board meetings. No investors telling him what "scale" should look like.
VCs have been practically begging him to take their money ever since. Cold calls. Unsolicited term sheets. Desperate requests for "warm introductions" from his inner circle.
He's turned down every single one.
Today, Midjourney does $500M+ in revenue with 40 employees. That's $12.5 million per employee (while Slack does $240K and Dropbox does $595K). Holz says he wants to stay bootstrapped forever. "Kind of like Craigslist."
Meanwhile, 85% of seed-funded startups never make it to Series A. They raised money, hired teams, celebrated on LinkedIn, and then slowly died in the space between rounds when investors stopped returning emails.
Two paths. Two very different outcomes.
Here's the part nobody talks about: the middle path, "raise a little, figure it out later", is now a death trap.
The founders winning in 2025 either sprinted to Series A with military precision... or never needed VC permission in the first place.
Let me show you how to know which path is yours.
And if you scroll down to the end, I'll give you a tool that runs the math for you. I’m giving away a Claude Skill built on the same frameworks YC partners use to evaluate whether founders are ready. Install it, tell it about your startup, get back your honest odds.
But first, you need to understand why the old playbook stopped working.