"Oh look! Someone just sold a company similar to ours for a million billion trillion dollars. And look at that, they raised a bunch of money along the way. I bet if I had raised money I would be a huge success too."

Whether or not we think about it daily, many of us have this nagging thought in the back of our minds of the "what if?" of raising capital. We picture this alternate universe where we took on investor funding and grew to become the next great darling of our industry.

The problem with that thought process, though, is that it puts "raising capital" in the same bucket as "executing properly" which is very different.

There's a time and a place where raising capital absolutely makes sense, but often we're either not there or we misu...