If you raise VC (series A) you can pay yourself a decent salary while keeping a good chunk of equity and building your company. Not a huge salary and not saving tons of money of you live in SF, but you won't be burning resources.

Very different from using all of your resources to self fund it.

POF was a minimalist app in a well trodden market. You shouldn't raise VC to do something like this, and you shouldn't be able to (though yes it happens far too often).

There are many problems and markets that just don't fit this approach.