S 01 | Ep 33 The Power of Positioning and Narrative in Marketing Greg Head spent three decades building software companies , took one to IPO , and now spends his time talking to hundreds of founders a year who are doing something the startup press rarely covers : building valuable software businesses without venture capital . Greg proposes that VC funding is not ingerently bad , however the model has changed in ways most founders do not fully understand . Funds got bigger , which means minimum check sizes got bigger , which means the pressure to deploy capital early and grow fast got more intense . The result is founders getting rocket fuel before they have built a rocket , and the predictable explosions that follow . What he is seeing instead , across forty companies in his peer group and conversations with hundreds more , is that the experimentation phase that leads to genuine product - market fit actually requires time and tries , not money . The Canva founders built related companies before Canva . The Webflow founders shipped two earlier versions .