even if we laid off 100 percent of the employees, the infrastructure costs would still kill us without a sharper sales ramp. - Ben Horowitz

Ben: “If you need me, I will come home.” Felicia: “No. Get the IPO done. There is no tomorrow for you and the company. I’ll be fine.

When analyzing whether you should sell your company, a good basic rule of thumb is if (a) you are very early on in a very large market and (b) you have a good chance of being number one in that market, then you should remain stand-alone. The reason is that nobody will be able to afford to pay what you are worth, because nobody can give you that much forward credit. For an easy-to-understand example, consider Google. When they were very early, they reportedly received multiple acquisition offers for more than $1 billion. These were considered very rich offers at the time and they amounted to a gigantic multiple. However, given the size of the ultimate market, it did not make sense for Google to sell. In fact, it didn’t make sense for Google to sell to any suitor at any price that the buyer could have paid. Why? Because the market that Google was pursuing was actually bigger than the markets that all of the potential buyers owned and Google had built a nearly invincible product lead that enabled them to be number one.

What would you do if capital were free?” is a dangerous question to ask an entrepreneur. It’s kind of like asking a fat person, “What would you do if ice cream had the exact same nutritional value as broccoli?