FWIW, my company, TrueFire, is one of the industry leaders in music education. We were bootstrapped, focused on a niche of the market first (intermediate to advanced video lessons for blues, jazz, etc = older men with expendable income), and have grown steadily since then. We were just acquired by a private equity firm and merged with another big competitor in the space (JamPlay) to form a new company dedicated to dominating this space. So... it is possible to not go the VC route and be (very) successful, albeit not $Bs.