If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late. - Reid Hoffman

When you are blitzscaling your start-up, growth is so rapid and your organization is pushing its limits in so many ways that multiple things are always breaking. It’s tempting to fix these things with money, but you have to resist that temptation. Only spend money to fix things that are on the critical path to reach the next phase of scale; everything else can wait. As I described earlier, at PayPal we deliberately avoided spending money on customer service because we knew it wasn’t a critical path. The more you can keep juggling and defer spending, the more likely you’ll be able to raise money without the pressure of a short runway.

If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.

Having “extra” capital gives you a cushion for when outcomes do not in fact follow your plan. Moreover, it increases your optionality — if you need to invest in growth, you can do much more without having to go through the time-consuming process of raising another round. As Mariam Naficy, CEO of Minted, told me, “Act like you’ve got half the amount you have in the bank because you’ve got to factor in all the failures and all the optimizations that kill great entrepreneurs and businesses all the time. Both of us know so many people who had good ideas and were on the right track, but just ran out of money.” At both PayPal and LinkedIn, we raised large financing rounds right before a market meltdown (2000, 2008), and we sure were glad we did. In the case of PayPal, that money allowed us to keep growing during the dot-com bust; without it, we wouldn’t have made it to our IPO. In the case of LinkedIn, the situation wasn’t as dire, but I realized that the value of the optionality from additional funding far outweighed the potential negatives of equity dilution.