Because people are getting the wrong picture, here’s some context. There is documented evidence, mainly on large early rounds reducing experimentation and enabling premature scaling, rather than on any funding being harmful. A 2025 working paper by Harsh Ketkar (UT Austin) and Maria Roche (Harvard Business School), “Too Much, Too Soon? Early Funding, Technological Unconventionality, and Innovation Capabilities,” analyzes nearly 800,000 firm-month observations on about 11,800 software-oriented startups founded and funded between 2010 and 2019 (PitchBook plus BuiltWith technology-stack data). After first funding, average technological unconventionality (unusual combinations in the product stack) fell by more than 20 percent. Larger first rounds were linked to steeper declines. Longer delays before the first round attenuated the drop: firms that waited continued to reconfigure stacks more, discarded technologies more often, and adopted fewer paid or advertising tools. Higher average unconventionality was associated with a greater chance of successful exit. The authors argue that early resource constraints force more deliberate experimentation, while abundant early capital reduces the need to search and can lock in less distinctive technology combinations. Harvard Business School coverage and a related HBR discussion of the work emphasize the same timing effect, using Color Labs (about $41 million raised before product launch in 2011, then shut down after rapid scaling and weak iteration) as an illustration. Older survey evidence points the same direction through failure rates. The Startup Genome project (roughly 3,200 high-growth technology startups, reported in 2011) found that about 70 percent scaled prematurely, hiring, spending, or expanding markets ahead of validated traction. In that dataset, no prematurely scaled startup reached 100,000 users, and 93 percent never exceeded $100,000 in monthly revenue; startups that scaled in step with traction grew roughly 20 times faster. Premature scaling is often financed by early capital that removes the pressure to test assumptions before building team and product. Practitioner observations align with the data. Investor Fred Wilson has stated that the amount raised in seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success in the data he reviews. Paul Graham has also argued that larger raises lead to more spending (especially on people), which makes early startups more rigid and less able to change direction. These findings are not universal though. Other work finds that venture capital can support higher-quality or more novel patents under some conditions (for example, experienced investors in hot markets funding riskier experiments, or early corporate venture capital raising patent counts while lowering IPO odds). Delays in funding can also hurt science-heavy startups that need capital to commercialize. The clearest documented pattern is that oversized or very early funding tends to reduce technological experimentation and raise the odds of scaling before product-market fit, which is a common path to failure. In this case, my brain tells me the funding is too early as it tends to redirect a founders mind from the curiousity that brings stability and PMF to other things. Mitchell Elegbe, co-founder and CEO of Interswitch, has said it most directly. At the 2024 Doing Business in Nigeria conference he argued that many Nigerian startups fail because they treat successive raises as the plan. “A lot of companies have failed because they were dependent on raising money. They hoped to raise one fund after another. That works very well in Silicon Valley. But we are in the Tropical Savanah; you only have one chance. Don’t waste it.” He added that a round raised two years earlier might be the last for five years, so how it is used matters. In earlier remarks he has tied the same point to Interswitch’s own start: the company raised only about $500,000 against a $1 million target and had to turn a profit in year one because there was no realistic second check. His related advice is to prove someone will pay at a profitable price before scaling, rather than buy market share with free use and hope to monetize later. Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe has made a similar caution about blitzscaling. In a 2021 Tekedia note he wrote that he teaches the concept but tells Nigerian founders not to use it until the economy is more predictable. His reason is the long path to profitability and volatility: if timing slips by months during a capital-fueled ramp, the company runs out of cash. He has called blitzscaling inside that environment “an illusion.” Others allude to it through practice. Odunayo Eweniyi of PiggyVest has described building the earlier product and the savings platform with little marketing spend and no external capital until 2018, after users had already saved substantial amounts. This is the most compelling for me. Commentators in the local ecosystem (including coverage of post-funding collapses such as 54gene after roughly $45 million, and pieces on over-reliance on fundraising) repeatedly describe the same pattern: large early checks used for headcount, offices, and expansion before unit economics or product-market fit hold, followed by a funding cliff when the next round does not arrive. The Nigerian version is therefore less “money reduces technological unconventionality” (the Harvard/UT finding) and more “in a market where follow-on capital is scarce and costly, early money that is spent on scale before the model works is often fatal.” Elegbe’s “one chance” formulation is the clearest documented statement of that view. Hope this helps.