The "raise seed, build team, raise again" cycle seems to produce a specific kind of founder misery. Why do so many smart people keep choosing it? I will not promote

Not being snarky, genuinely curious. I keep seeing posts from founders who raised $500K-$1M pre-seed, hired fast, burned through it, and are now 18 months in with a product that's "almost" profitable and an investor call every week. Meanwhile some of the most stable founders I know are doing $5K-$15K MRR solo or with one other person. High margins, no pressure, actual product-market fit because they couldn't hide behind fundraising. I'm one of those who built a data scraping tool, bootstrapped, growing slow