Starting a company is filled with social expectations and refusing to raise money is certainly not going to spare you from them. Founding a company is an exercise in setting expectations you're not sure you can fulfill, you'll certainly be setting those expectations with your early customers, by definition you'll be making some sort of agreement with your first customer that you've never fulfilled for someone in the past. You want to manage the expectations of course, but to say that raising money implies expectations and thus the best course is to not consider raising money is foolish. You'll likely just compromise your ability to meet other expectations.
I could see the logic from a VC perspective- VCs aren't going to make any money from companies that don't take funding from them. Companies that don't take funding may as well not exist to them. VC firms themselves are businesses that make money by nurturing other businesses. That just means that all VC firms need startups to nurture, it doesn't mean that all startups must be nurtured by VC firms.
edit: I realized my response references a different comment I made. Sorry about that, I've modified it.
If there's nothing you could do with the money then I agree it makes no sense to spend time and energy raising. That doesn't seem to be the OPs position though, instead there seems to be a moral reason for not raising money. I'm not arguing that all startups must be nurtured by VCs, just that saying there's no conditions under which you'll accept money from a VC isn't a rational stance.
The business model would need to support it though. The business model taking on lots of cash needed a community to be effective and would have been extremely difficult to achieve without those resources. Being able to self fund and find paying customers early is not always an option.
However, 37signals seemed have done a really unique deal with Bezos so who knows. I wouldn't bank on you getting that same deal though!
There are never no strings attached. At the very least there are social expectations. Some people feel expectations very acutely and try hard not to set expectations they aren't sure they can fulfill.
> if you could raise a seed round while giving away a minimal amount of your company and not giving away control, why wouldn't you?
You have no idea when or if a liquidity event might happen or how big it might be and you want to make as few promises as possible to keep your options open, including holding no substantial assets at all.
You don't want to add another person to the list of people you have to loop in to conversations.
You don't want to leak information into the tech establishment.
You expect big dilutions later on and you want to keep as much equity as you can initially.