Thanks for the link to the article. It's a great article. My interpretation of your response is that you would suggest I do not try to get any investment and rather continue to do the contracts, but otherwise following the specific advice on the "third road" from the article.

I think I have been ineffectually following something like the "third road" for ten years already. Although in my case maybe instead of a road up a stately mountain, it's more like getting lost in a ghetto, because I do not seem to progress beyond the low-paying contracts or get any significant interest in my startup attempts. Probably I have just gotten used to them.

It depends on a lot of factors. Personality, life goals, circumstances. I took on investment for a start-up at some point and ended up paying it all back because I realized I was headed straight for a burn out with all this pressure on me and it helped me a lot. And - controversially! - I ended up as a small time investor and LP at a bunch of funds and I do a lot of tech DD, which is still in the service of the VC world. It was quite a series of coincidences that led to that but the end result is that I'm pretty happy with how things turned out, even though several attempts to make this company independent of me have failed and I'm pretty much reconciled to running it at a lower level of ambition.