capping downside vs going all in to preserve upside

could anyone share their business philosophy as far as capping your downside risk by not investing too much of your personal money into a project vs going all in to maintain all of the possible upside on a project? I can elaborate on personal circumstances and thoughts in the comments but let's keep the question broad I want to see how people generally respond to the question.

4 Comments
 

I heard this thing about David Geffen getting into a JV with Warner where they would put up all the money to finance the record label and he would get some big % of the profits for just running the company, he jumped at the deal cause there was no downside risk and there was the opportunity to make a bunch of money. Most financiers aren't just gonna give you golden goose deals like that where you get to have a ton of upside and you didn't have to invest any of your own money unless you have some special skillset.

 

it's just interesting to think about cause there are some people who had nothing like Quentin Tarantino, he saved up $5000 from his job at a movie store and spent it over the course of 3 years to get his first movie made, the movie sucked and did nothing for him, when you have nothing you aren't risk averse at all (the consequences aren't that severe if you fail)

 

on the flip side Elon Musk put all his money from PayPal into his next companies I think I heard something along those lines before, so even dudes who already made it big, some of them aren't afraid to go all in on their new venture to either just make it happen in the first place or maybe so that they can preserve some level of control or some level of upside

 

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