A lot of entrepreneurs may have dreams of building a business, getting venture capital money, and then building a super great company that will make them rich. I have no personal experience with this (yet anyway), but having studied the subject some, my opinion would be, for a brand-new entrepreneur, do not seek venture capital. Yes, there's the chance you could start the next Google or Facebook and get venture capital and become a billionaire very quickly, but this is extremely unlikely. There's a few bad things that can happen if you are a new entrepreneur seeking venture capital:
1) The business is likely your livelihood. It's how you feed yourself and your family if you have one. And the venture capitalists will know this. If so, they have a lot of leverage over you. They will know if you are desperate or not. This doesn't mean one can't seek venture capital with a new business, but if so, make it where it is purely optional; do not design the business from the get-go where it would absolutely need venture funding. This way, the venture capitalists will not have leverage over you if you can always reject their offer and walk away.
2) You lose freedom and control of your business once venture investors come in. They are in the business to make money, and in exhange for money, you give up equity in the firm, and hence a good deal of control. Now, the company no longer just moves along at the pace you want it to, instead, it has to grow and produce some real results, the kind that the venture capitalists want (it might produce results that are okay with you, but not okay with the venture capitalists). There might be things you want to do, directions you might want to take the business that now you cannot.
3) An inexperienced entrepreneur up against experienced venture capitalists can end up finding themselves made into an employee of their own company. The venture capitalists may well replace you as the CEO with someone much more seasoned and experienced in growing and operating businesses, and you may even find yourself fired from your own company, losing your equity stake.
2 and 3 can be especially stressful if the company is your livelihood. In my opinion, I would first build up a company that I completely own, then, after having built up a level of wealth in this sense, I would look for venture capital when starting up another company. At this point, you are far more experienced as an entrepreneur, maybe even in a position where you could yourself be a venture capitalist. You will have far more leverage over the venture capitalists in the sense that the company is not your livelihood. It is not the primary source of your wealth. You therefore will not be as inhibited about giving up equity in the company and hence control and the venture capitalists will know they can't push you around like an entrepreneur for whom the business is their livelihood.
In addition, two added benefits are that now that you have experience from having built a business already, you are not an inexperienced entrepreneur dealing with the venture capitalists, but rather an experienced one (and thus more able to spot any tricks they might be trying to pull on you), and also, because of this experience, the venture capitalists may be a lot less likely to want to replace you as the CEO, as you're not some inexperienced person in the CEO chair of the company in which they have invested money, but rather a successful person in your own right who already has built a prior successful business, who now is seeking to build another successful business. If anything, that's an incentive to KEEP you in the CEO chair.
I would follow this same strategy regarding partnering with other people to build a business as well. If two or three people decide to partner together to build a business, it can work, but then again, it can be very prone to failing, in particular if the partners' livelihoods are tied to the performance of the business. If two or three people decide to form a company because they feel they can create a company that will make them much richer, it is a lot easier emotionally if each partner already has their primary fortune elsewhere, and thus if the business venture fails, then they've lost money (which can still create hard feelings), but no one is now worrying about how to feed themselves or their family.
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