Comment by muzani

VCs can only back ideas that are worth over a billion dollars. Everything below a billion dollars is small.

This creates two different types of companies. With VC-backed you'll have an abundance of cash, because that cash is buying you time, growth, etc. If cash is the problem, then do big ideas. A common strategy is to grow one vertical and ignore the others, while paying off the ignored verticals with cash. This is your YouTube without ads, your Android without an app store.

With smaller ideas, you'll be self-sustainable and resistant to enshittification because you're not buying (tech/product) debt with all that money. You can't actually build things that need multiple verticals, like Facebook or Google; you'd run out of money long before. And you often can't hire senior level talent.

The downside is the big idea will usually buy out all the small ideas. You built a PDF converter for a game and then Zynga offers you $10m cash for it. Is that really a downside?

Also one thing that's always overlook is distribution. How do you reach the market? Slack lost ground to MS Teams despite having the better product because MS dominates enterprise channels. Big ideas are able to dominate distribution and siege you no matter your moat.