Re:Why I switched sides: From bootstrapping to VC
by fredrivett on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:03PM
(#18310473)
Appreciate your thoughts here Dave, agree with what you say. A quick point of clarification on my situation (author of the post), I didn't take a failing bootstrapped company and get it funding. I stepped away entirely from the bootstrapped work I was doing, for personal reasons (to focus on things other than working all the time), and then an entirely separate opportunity came up to start a startup with funding, which I took because of the autonomy (mostly self-directed work), mastery (learning a tonne in a role I've never done before, alongside super smart people) and purpose (creating a company culture that isn't "crush it" startup bro style + attempting to help the news industry adjust to today's culture).
Hope that makes sense, just wanted to clarify that.
If your bootstrapping is failing financially, or not meeting your own needs (as described in the article), VCs are a valid choice to kick it back up to try to succeed. Better that than shutting down. But the anti-VC perspective is talking about a different scenario: If your bootstrap is working, they would argue not to take on VC just to speed it up or meet some cultural expectation of a funding milestone.
Which ultimately sums up the article for me - their particular bootstrapping wasn't working for them, so they switched to the VC route.