Girish Mathrubootham on VC vs Bootstrapping

At the time of writing, the firm had taken no outside funding, was burning around $5,000 a month for the six-member team, and was operating with team members accepting 30–50% of market salaries in exchange for stock options — the founder himself taking no salary at all.

Mathrubootham treats traction as the single most important metric for any investor pitch, having deliberately kept the AngelList profile invisible until launch — an explicit statement that, in his view, product validation must precede fundraising, especially for a category where the only moat initially is execution speed.