If you raise money and fail, you need to consider the opportunity cost of another entrepreneur not having had access to the investment capital you lost. If you fail, you need to be sad about your failure and also be sad about the opportunity cost of your failure.

But it’s “risk capital” you say – money that investment funds allocated to very high-risk/high-return investments. So the thinking is that it’s OK for that capital to go away because it’s expected to either succeed big and likely to fail. But what about the 1 or 10 or 50 other businesses that lost access to that capital once it was invested? Could one of them have been the next Google?