Is $75 Million in Venture Capital an Advantage? @ NYTimes.com.

Steve Blank retired from serial entrepreneurship after working with eight start-ups, including E.piphany, a software company that he helped found and sold in 2005 for $329 million. Today he’s an associate professor in management science and engineering at Stanford University and co-author of “The Startup Owner’s Manual.” Mr. Blank is credited with helping to create the lean start-up movement, which holds that start-ups can be successful without large amounts of cash. As we considered the example posed in our just-published articlecontrasting the financing experiences of two data companies that went after roughly the same market at roughly the same time, GoodData (venture-backed) and RJMetrics (mostly self-financed), we asked Mr. Blank for his views on an age-old question.