Maybe one thing lead to another. By making your customers and employees happy, you make your investors happy.
The money makes sense when you need to scale fast. Specially in the development stage, when you don't make a dime yet.
With the advance of the internet marketing, it's don't make much sense, as you put.
Investors should be moving their money from internet, i think, to AI, Space, Augmented reality and so on. They should fund stuff that is really risky. Turns up ... internet is not risky anymore.
This is a myth. I've just parted ways with a second company in a row that had to discover for themselves that 'internet marketing' wouldn't magically solve their top-of-the-funnel problem.
Unless you are independently wealthy or building something that can truly be bootstrapped (no expensive R&D, for example), investors are a necessary constant.
I mean, I do contract work with startups and get paid with investor money all the time, so it's good for me.
But I think most investors are a liability.
First you have to make your employees and your customers happy and now you also have to make investors happy? How shoult this be a good thing?
It's hard enough to build products for users I can't directly interact with, why should this equation get another variable :\