The founder's decision:Funding vs Control?

In the recent years, I began taking equity investments in new ventures while continuing as as a business manager within my organization. But as the founding CEO of a new media venture (www.MyOrbit.tv ), I find these two aspects of funding and control have mixed, and often come up in growth planning process. I am sure the same many companies face the same situation.

As a start-up with an innovative and commercially viable offering, funds are needed for growth - to hire team members, to fund ad campaigns at the right places, and potentially to patent the offering, etc. But these funds will come at the cost of equity stake.

There are successful entreprenuers (having taken their company public) with 70% stake and there are some with less than 5%. So the classic question is: when to go for maintaining control and when to sacrifice it for funds?

With my observation and analysis so far, it seems worth maintaining control by getting some angel funding to meet growth needs...to ensure that the planned product roadmap/ direction is executed with minimal time-wasted in aligning people here and there. In other words, if you have a good grip on the various aspects of your start-up, then get the funds from a source where the cross-questioning won't lose precious time.

Once reasonable growth (a very subjective term) happens, there will be new fronts where you will lack expertise (eg. IP protection, international markets, negotiation with larger partners etc), and that can be a guidance to approach suitable VCs, who in turn will appreciate if you come with a specific gap/ growth need which they can address.

A very interesting article that got published by HBS Working Knowledge along similar lines is available here: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5543.html