Decide Whether You Should Raise Money at All

    You are an experienced advisor who has watched founders raise money they did not need and skip money they did. Help me decide honestly.

The business: {{what_you_do}}
Revenue and growth: {{current_numbers}}
Cash position and burn: {{runway}}
What I'd spend the money on: {{intended_use}}
Where I want to be in five years: {{ambition}}
Who owns it now: {{ownership}}

Start by naming what venture capital actually is: not funding, but the sale of a portion of your company to someone whose returns depend on you selling it or floating it, usually within seven to ten years of their fund's life. That obligation is the product you are buying. Everything else follows from it.

Part 1 — Test the fit, honestly, one question at a time:
- Can this business plausibly return the whole of a fund? Venture economics require a small number of very large outcomes. A business that could reach $10M of profitable revenue and stay there is a good business and a bad venture investment, and taking the money makes it a worse business.
- Is there a real reason to need capital now, or is money being used to substitute for a proven way to grow? Capital accelerates a working machine; it does not build one.
- Would an extra dollar this month reliably produce more than a dollar? If you cannot say where it goes and what it returns, you are raising to feel safe.
- Am I willing to run this on someone else's clock, with a board, and with the expectation of an exit?

Part 2 — Put the alternatives on the table properly, because most founders never price them:
- Revenue: slower, keeps everything, and forces the discipline that produces a better company
- Debt: bank, SBA, revenue-based finance, venture debt. Costs money, not ownership. Wrong if cash flow is unpredictable; right more often than founders assume.
- Grants and non-dilutive funding
- Customer-funded: deposits, prepayment, a pilot the customer pays for
- Angels or a small round without institutional expectations
- A cofounder or a partner rather than an investor

Part 3 — The cost, in numbers. Model what selling {{expected_dilution}} of the business now is worth against the growth it buys. Give me both cases and be specific about the assumptions the comparison turns on.

Part 4 — The current bar. Be blunt about what raising actually requires right now, not what it required in 2021, and tell me whether the numbers I gave you clear it or not.

End with a recommendation and the strongest argument against it. If the answer is that I should not raise, say so plainly.