It’s true that many capital-efficient companies are capital light. (They have low capital expenditures, abbreviated as “low CapEx.”) But in practice, companies with high capital needs can also be successful in both raising funding and reaching multibillion-dollar outcomes. About 42 percent of billion-dollar startups in my study were capital light,

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There are upsides and downsides to each approach. Almost half of billion-dollar companies focused on systems integration, which can be easier to pull off given the low technical lift but could be more costly in sales and customer acquisition. It’s much harder to solve a deep-tech problem, but doing so can act as a defense for those startups.

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Both low CapEx and high CapEx companies can reach multibillion-dollar outcomes. Although in my dataset the high CapEx billion-dollar startups were on average 25 percent less capital efficient than low CapEx ones, many capital-intensive startups became very successful companies, generating billions of dollars in shareholder value and creating

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