We had to actually fight our investors to reduce our spending by 50%. We prevailed, and that's probably the reason the company's finally making money years later (instead of going broke early on), but it was a strange situation.
This pressure is the natural misalignment of incentives of investors and entrepreneurs.
It's a cliche, but it's true: investors want you to go big or go home. Their outcome is binary. The IRR they see gets killed if you take 15 years to exit instead of 5. As an entrepreneur, you may very well make life-changing money by riding it out and making your vision work eventually, but that's not how (most) (professional) investors measure success.
Which is why you should think long and hard before you raise money about whether you WANT to deal with that misalignment in your life.
No doubt, raising money is viewed as cool (viz. entreporn) and may ease your path in other ways, but it introduces certain physics to your business.
