Fair enough. But funding is one of the few publicly visible milestones that a startup can achieve. One could argue that it's almost a proxy for success. Either

Fair enough. But funding is one of the few publicly visible milestones that a startup can achieve. One could argue that it's almost a proxy for success. Either that or we should all get excited with a press release from Dropbox saying they reached 10 million users. But that doesn't excite geeks (do you care if Apple sold 20 million iPhones this month? No, you care about the iPhone 5).