You don't always need other people's money. We've all heard the professional investor's elevator pitch, "Sure, you can grow your business, but you can grow it faster with our money." We were shocked by the fact that not one of nine breakthrough companies was funded by venture capital in their start-up years. Scott Cook tried to raise venture money for Intuit and was turned down by more than twenty firms (he accepted a small amount of private money just before Intuit went public in 1993, mainly to tap the genius of Silicon Valley legendary VCs John Doerr and Burt McMurtry).