Pat Phelan (unwittingly) touched upon this in his infamous post http://patphelan.net/irish-silicon-valley-dont-make-me-laugh on his own website.

There, someone who runs their own business and has a supposed fantastic business idea felt that they should be getting support from the government and government agencies rather than spending their own money to expo their product.

If they believed so much in their product, they’d have gotten the money together and gone. Full stop.

You can’t see any VCs wanting to get involved now with someone like that who doesn’t even show that little amount of faith in their product – so why should anyone else.