I'd question that, actually. The vast majority of huge tech companies that you've heard of today - Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, EBay, AirBnB, Whatsapp, Snapchat, GitHub - managed to construct a working product without taking investment. Several others - DropBox, Stripe, Instagram, Slack - had only a relatively small seed or angel round before launching a product. Meanwhile the track record for companies that take a huge amount of investment before delivering a product - Theranos, Webvan, Go, Magic Leap, etc. - is pretty abysmal.
YC and several other top-tier VCs recommend that you keep the startup as small as possible, oftentimes just the founding team, until you've built a product that's popular enough that you're swamped with demand. Then you can go and raise working capital to fund expansion and fuel growth, but not before. It's not true that the company wouldn't exist without the capital investment, though - it's actually pretty critical that the company does exist before raising capital.
It may be the chicken or the egg, but, if you have some employee that can achieve something that others can't, he can go somewhere else and achieve the same. The money could be equally applied and it will not bring success. No money means failure but no employee means no chance of success, money or not.
Company and work that, in most cases, wouldn't exist without a capital investment.