> Looking back that is all that mattered. They didn't care we had customers and revenue and a good deck or market.

...did you care? If you had customers and revenue, why did you need VC?

VCs are necessary to accelerate progress. Especially in tech companies where R&D is so expensive up front and yet scales well when it's done. And a side effect of VCs is that it's more expensive to operate in the same industry as one.

because the competition has VCs or deep pockets and to compete effectively and get visibilty in the market you need more money than what you can generate by bootstrapping. and no, you cannot convince people to just work for equity.

Yeah, much less a working product. Tech vc is sprinkling money around hoping to grow magic. If you have revenue it probably isn’t speculative magic revenue.

Exactly, if you making money it suggests there is a market , that means there must be competitors....even though every unicorn start up ends up with many competitors...and if there are competitors it's not venture fundable..

when asked if there are competitors, regardless of what we answered, the answer was wrong. that again proves my point that all that matters is that investors know you, and that requires a lot of time, which becomes extremely expensive if you are in silicon valley, and only affordable if you are already rich or have a family that’s rich, and do not have to build a product.