The folks who became truly wealthy and built truly sustainable businesses are the ones who bootstrapped from early product revenue and spent only what they had to. Think Hewlett and Packard, Bill Gates at Microsoft, and the like.
Folks who talked investors into pouring huge amounts of money into startups or yet unprofitable businesses, which was subsequently lost, were sometimes extraordinary technologists but bad business people (think Gene Amdahl with Trilogy in the mid 1980s, which burned through about a third of a billion dollars — over a billion in today’s dollars — on a hardware technology premise of wafer scale integration which didn’t end up delivering anything useful to a customer) (or WebVan, which I loved as a customer but the numbers just didn’t work).
Today I have to wonder if some of the folks talking investors into pouring huge sums of money into pre-profit companies are just playing the “…sucker born every minute…” game, like some of the startups selling themselves to big company acquirers.
