For sure most fund raises are on the basis of hockey stick go big or go home. It’s a moonshot and if you get stuck in orbit and cannot escape the pull of gravity you’ll burn fuel until you re enter the atmosphere…usually breaking up in the process.

At which point your business might be sold at garage sale prices. Or restructured with the C suite removed in the process. It’s just brutal.

We bootstrapped over 15 years (not a typo) and for sure can survive the next two years without issue which I’m very thankful for.

I love your idea of trying to find a balance but investors will need to be much more patient than they have been historically. Most won’t wait a year or two for return which means they are fantastically short sighted.

you aren’t immune from these problems just because you aren’t taking VC funding.

Most bootstrapped companies need some initial funding which usually comes from the founders bank account, with the idea being that’s it.

But it can be tempting to accelerate your bootstrapped growth by taking debt financing (credit cards, mortgages and other personally guaranteed loans)

The difference is that in most of these cases you are personally liable whereas you can walk away from VC funded businesses.

Started my business with £20k of credit card debt. Would have sucked had it not worked out. Was a huge sigh of relief the day I was able to pay it off.

I don’t think receiving funding from VC’s has anything to do with regards as to how you manage your company e.g if you wish to be profitable from the start

Sure they can pressure you but especially at the preseed - series A they shouldn’t have any sort of operating control

Most VCs go in with a go-big-or-go-broke mentality. The entire calculation is to get a couple 10x-100x exits to offset all the failed attempts. Leveling off after a series C to "just" a profitable company makes business sense for the company and founders. But if you do that the series B and series C investors can't get their big exit, so they will do whatever they can to prevent that.

The best way out once you're in this deep is probably an IPO. The investors get their exit, and you're now "only" beholden to shareholders, who are more used to sustainable businesses that can survive decades or centuries.

After writing this, I realized that that is kind of how businesses used to work. You would take a few rounds of funding from friends, family, and eventually connections/PE firms before going public. The whole idea of IPO-ing after series F is the new, weird thing.

Bootstrapping is magnificent. I consider the Calendly funding story absolutely fantastic: under $1M in Seed + Debt and next round comes years mater, at 3.5B valuation.

I completely agree with your sentiment. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. However, I've dearly learned in the past few years that as a boostrapper, one of the biggest dangers is believing that markets seem real, when in fact, they are only being buoyed by puffery and hype. This causes a mistaken belief that there are customers and the market is indeed growing and significant for new entrants when what's actually happening is rapidly growing companies supported by investor money, not customers.

When a bootstrapper tries to come into the market and isn't playing the startup game, by trying to build a company through customer money vs. investor money, they see that there aren't nearly as many customers as they would like, and the hypey startups are eating up a significant portion of the customer base, since customers, far and few between in rapidly growing, hypey markets, tend to be "lazy" buyers and will not spend the time to do any sort of real evaluation or analysis of competition and markets. Rather, they will buy either from who they are already buying from, or if they will select a new vendor, it will be someone who is gaining the most attention at that moment and who they can get support. Ideally, if it costs nothing or very little to acquire, that makes it even easier. The latter makes it near impossible to support this as a bootstrapper, since you can't afford to give a product away, even if the startup can. All this makes bootstrapping particularly difficult in fast-growth, hypey markets, which is where startups tend to proliferate. You can bootstrap in more sedate markets, but you'll face entrenchment of incumbents even more the case and so making entry into the market as a bootstrapper just as difficult. The key is to know what game you're playing and the best way to win at it, if you want to succeed, especially without exhausting yourself in the process.