You have very valid points all around - but allow me to push on some of them a bit. Even though Google's tech was built without VC, their consumer product and

You have very valid points all around - but allow me to push on some of them a bit. Even though Google's tech was built without VC, their consumer product and fundamental business were far from built and people had written off the entire web search space by that time anyway. It's kind of like if someone came to you today and pitched you something like food delivery with a better algorithm when nearly all major food delivery services today aren't doing so well and people have already developed strong biases against the space. AirBnB isn't only a short-term home rental market though - it's a bit more cavalier of a product than that. Short term home rental does definitely exist on AirBnB and is huge but AirBnB also encompasses the spectrum between staying on someone's couch and straight up short-term home rental. The other difference is that it also covered massive areas that were traditionally ignored by hotels and other short-term home rental services. So in that sense, the VC money was needed to market the product appropriately, build trust with users through insurance guarantees, build liquidity in areas where it was a competitive advantage and do the legal/lobbying legwork. That's the real magic and that couldn't have been accomplished through a traditional finances first approach and certainly couldn't have grown so large so fast. Let me put it this way: whether AirBnB ended up as a cute hipster alternative to VRBO (which was playing in a tiny market) or whether AirBnB ended up as a straight-up hotel-alternative depended on VC money to believe.