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Most investors prefer "learn-it-alls" to "know-it-alls."

If you experience great difficulty in raising money, it's not because VCs are idiots and cannot comprehend your curve-jumping, paradigm shifting, revolutionary product. It's because you either have a piece of crap or you are not effectively communicating what you have. Both of these are your fault. End of discussion.

There is nothing investors like more than a startup that seems like it's going to succeed even without them. Investors like it when they can help a startup, but they don't like startups that would die without that help.

The reason they like it when you don't need them is not simply that they like what they can't have, but because that quality is what makes founders succeed.

The average investor is a pretty bad judge of startups. It's harder to judge startups than most other things, because great startup ideas tend to seem wrong. A good startup idea has to be not just good but novel. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to most people, or someone would already be doing it and it wouldn't be novel.