This is my thinking too - take the money but don't deploy it any faster or less efficiently than you otherwise would have. If that means your runway is extended to 10-15yrs, great! You now have the ability weather potential economic downturns or GFC 2.0's or other unforeseeable existential problems, it's insurance. Investors may not jive with that, preferring you to fail fast/fail early, but if you can take that investment and keep control of the board, then it's at least worth serious consideration.
The investors have liquidation preferences, so you need the company to be worth more than 40m or your equity is worthless. If you grow slowly, the next investor won't be interested, so it'll be hard to justify the valuation.
In this situation you don't get rich. You just get a salary for 10 years. That's not nothing, but if you've come this far, it's hardly the best outcome.
My recollection from a fairly lowly place in a startup many years ago, that it doesn't work that way. The quid pro quo then for taking the money was rapid growth.
I was busily scoping out systems to automate stuff so that we could scale, but the impression I got was that the VCs were very very interested in seeing rapid expansion of head-count because that was an important metric for them.
I remember having these weird conversations with me saying 'we don't need to find a bigger office, if we get this workflow automated, we can just go down the pub while the money rolls in'. Ah to be young and naive.
This is my thinking too - take the money but don't deploy it any faster or less efficiently than you otherwise would have. If that means your runway is extended to 10-15yrs, great! You now have the ability weather potential economic downturns or GFC 2.0's or other unforeseeable existential problems, it's insurance. Investors may not jive with that, preferring you to fail fast/fail early, but if you can take that investment and keep control of the board, then it's at least worth serious consideration.