Kudos to Michael and Dalton for admitting a lot of truths that aren't VC / incubator friendly, like that most businesses should not be raising VC funding, or th

Kudos to Michael and Dalton for admitting a lot of truths that aren't VC / incubator friendly, like that most businesses should not be raising VC funding, or that lots of founders have amazing lives and get rich without VC funding. However, they're still burying the lede and the key conclusion. From those admissions above, they go into sales mode and say that if you want to be a trillion dollar company, you generally need to raise VC funding. This part is also true in favor of VCs, but hides an important assumption. All the above says is that VCs are good for certain company types, and not good for other company types. But people don't start companies to be a specific type, or to raise VC funding or not -- these are secondary characteristics. The primary reason a founder starts a company should determine the company type and whether they take VC funding: 1) If you want to have a small (1%) chance of having a massive impact on the world (think billions of dollars of founder valuation), you should aim big and take VC funding. 2) If you want to have a larger minority (25%+) chance of being quite personally rich (think tens of millions), you should probably avoid moonshots and aim for base runs that don't accept VC money. For 1), it is quite easy to see, only 1% of YC company founders, who are considered amongst the best in the valley, have a billion dollars of personal valuation at the end. If you want to be a Zuckerberg or a Gates, you have to aim for this, but know that it's very rare in the base population. If you focus on the max valuation, then yes that clearly favors VCs. If you focus on expected utility for standard utility curves, that favors bootstrapping. --- Finally, as my personal opinion, it seems obvious a priori that VC startups would be a lot more over-promoted, after all, without VC-investable startups, VC funds would do poorly. Literally trillions of dollars depend on enough founders doing these startups -- and they have a massive marketing budget. [1] On the other hand, bootstrapped companies have no clear "partners that require them" who would overpromote them. [1] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html