I tried to be really clear on this that I am talking about online startups.

But I think you missed the point: It takes a lot of money (VC or otherwise) to create companies that go public, but it doesn't take much to create a great product.

Google is a perfect example: they didn't need significant up-front investments to create their first search engine - they ran it out of Stanford on borrowed computers. They built a product and had users way before they raised a ton of money.