Comment by vchak1

The analogy does not hold because you still lose time, which is IMHO the most valuable commodity because it represents opportunity cost.

In built into a lot of these discussions is a major assumption - that a startup is a "typical" silicon valley startup with the goal of being a massively valued entity. That changes the risk structure dramatically. If instead you tried to bootstrap something into a 2M annual revenue enterprise with minimal (say 200k) worth of investment, the equation changes quite significantly.

I'd assert that in that situation, playing the role of "early tech adopter" into new problem spaces dramatically reduces the risk as well.