As an entrepreneur I’ve never understood how closing a round of funding is somehow a badge of success. In fact it is quite the opposite. The ultimate businesses are those that are highly profitable and can scale using their own funding. Successful bootstrappers are the best entrepreneurs.
Actually the best businesses are those that can scale using no funding. Or employees. And a sole founder who does everything by sheer force of will. /s
> The ultimate businesses are those that are highly profitable and can scale using their own funding
I'd like to fly across the sky on a unicorn while drinking whiskey with a leprechaun, but it's not really in the cards.
How many bootstrapped businesses can you think of in the Fortune 100/500? It's very rare to get to that size without the capital to make mistakes. Bootstrapped businesses generally have very little room for risk, and the ones with business models that can both be executed on and monetized profitably to > $100MM revenue/yr can probably be counted on two hands (e.g. GitHub, Plenty Of Fish, Braintree, GoPro).
>the ones with business models that can both be executed on and monetized profitably to > $100MM revenue/yr can probably be counted on two hands (e.g. GitHub, Plenty Of Fish, Braintree, GoPro).
If you or even a small handful of people own 100% of a company, you don't need $100MM ARR to get rich beyond need.
You won't become Bezos but bootstrapped companies don't need to become unicorns to make everyone there be filthy rich. There are tons of people who bootstrapped companies and are very well-off from it.
On every major body of water in or on the boundary of the US, there are yachts. The yacht owners are overwhelming full or part owners of a successful business. Except maybe for near San Francisco or Boston, nearly none of the owners took venture capital.
Lesson: The people in the US quite comfortable financially rarely took venture capital.
I'd generally agree, however, seeking to team up with others for a greater good is also a healthy sign for an entrepreneur.
"Hey, you have some capital, and we have this great thing that can serve the world. We're capital constrained, either for quality or for growth, how about we partner to make the world a better place?"
I think that pitch significantly misaligns with the goals of most VCs. If you promised them "how about we partner up to earn billions of dollars?" you would probably find many more people willing to invest.
In some class of products, once you have a product market fit, you can start scaling marketing and such, which are easy to scale but require capital to operate. Funding round is one way to acquire capital.
