Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t have written the post that John Casasanta at taptaptap wrote about the VCs that are approaching him, but as Chris Rock would say — I understand.

A sample from John’s post:

“The vultures are out and and they taste blood. The iPhone’s one of the hottest things around right now and there’s little sign of its popularity letting up anytime soon. And the venture capitalists want in… badly. The fact that the iFund™ exists is overwhelming evidence of this.

Ever since my post discussing our sales stats we’ve gotten our share of VCs trying to court us. They desperately want a piece of the action and they’re pounding the pavement with full force.”

John goes on to recount the typical dialog with the VC where the VC guy (and it’s usually a guy) asks: what if you could do what you just did but x 100. John responds that he’s having a hard time finding even one great programmer. The VC then suggests that while great ones may be hard to find, perhaps a decent one will do. And right there is the problem.

The VC guys aren’t bad guys. They have a business model and they’re pursuing it. And in some small percentage of cases they can be a catalyst for companies that generate major wealth and sometimes wonderful products as well. The problem of course is that the VC business model depends on scale. They look for business opportunities that can scale exponentially. And John at taptaptap knows full well that with scale there’s almost always a non-trivial degradation of quality. John also knows that the tradeoff presented sometimes by certain folks in the VC community that you can either have scale and wealth or you can have quality and much less wealth is a false one in many cases. And more importantly, John cares a lot less about making something big than he does about making something great. And John knows that he can make lots of money making something small and great.

To use a comparison from the food world. Alain Passard is not a celebrity chef, but he is world famous among lovers of fine food. He cooks in Paris at a restaurant called L’Arpege. Wolfgang Puck hasn’t done regular cooking at any one of his ~10 million restaurant instances in many many years. When the money guys came to Puck and asked him if he wanted to put his name on frozen food lines, airport eateries, and anything else you can think of, Puck said yes, yes, and yes. And while Wolfgang Puck may be able to personally make a mean pizza, you can bet that the dudes working at his airport outlets are producing something that’s not nearly as good. (In fact it sucks.) And I would bet good money that when the money men approached Passard and asked him to put his name on varous products, and build an empire, he told them to fuck off. Wolfgang Puck probably has a lot more money than Alain Passard. But I bet Passard is not doing badly by any stretch. Dinner for two at his Paris restaurant can run over $1000.

Puck has his place. The guys looking to create big businesses have their place. And Passard certainly has his place.

John’s trying to make something special. And when someone comes to him under the pretense of wanting to do business with him but proposes a path that not only would destroy what John feels is special about his effort, but so clearly identifies the proposer as someone who misunderstands John and his company, John gets insulted. Just like I’m sure Passard is every time he gets approached. (In my mind I imagine a lot of swearing in French spoons getting thrown, and him riding up to his farm North of Paris on his Vespa. Apologies in advance to my French friends for my stereotyping of their anger.)

In the comments of John’s post you can see that the reactions aren’t all positive:

“This is good advice packaged but packaged in a terribly destructive way. I certainly try and design my startups to work well on bootstrapping or angel money, delaying institutional VC indefinitely. That MO tends to be much better for founder equity and employee returns, user-responsive product design, growing at a speed that is good for the company, etc.

On the other hand, WTF? Take a cold shower or something. The level of anger being displayed here has no place in this discussion or this community.”

I don’t know that the level of anger has “no place”… after all, it’s on the internet. And clearly there’s a place for all kinds of anger on the internet. That said, while I wouldn’t have written this post myself, I do understand where it comes from.

Note: I do think in rare cases it is possible to scale something large and keep a high quality bar. But you have to vastly reduce the complexity of what you’re producing. Sorry for all the food examples, but In-n-Out Burger comes to mind as a perfect example. I think in that case some of the best venture folks would be perfect partners for a guy like John to work with and make something big AND high quality.

UPDATE: I changed the references from Tapulous to taptaptap. Duh. Sorry. Thx Aaron.