When you take VC, you've just hired yourself a board full of bosses.
> you’re often left at the whims of your customer base
When does that ever stop being true?
If your bootstrapping is failing financially, or not meeting your own needs (as described in the article), VCs are a valid choice to kick it back up to try to succeed. Better that than shutting down. But the anti-VC perspective is talking about a different scenario: If your bootstrap is working, they would argue not to take on VC just to speed it up or meet some cultural expectation of a funding milestone.
Which ultimately sums up the article for me - their particular bootstrapping wasn't working for them, so they switched to the VC route.
Hope that makes sense, just wanted to clarify that.
Agree taking funding brings back an element of having a boss again Alan. It's certainly a trade-off of the VC route, and one of the main reasons I haven't taken funding before.
That said, I still think you get a good amount of autonomy by (co-)founding a startup, as you're often free to execute how you choose, but with the agreement that you'll pursue a path that can give an outsized return for your investors. Investors rarely want to dictate what and how you do things, in my experience.
> When does that ever stop being true?
Again I agree it doesn't, but it's something many bootstrappers don't quite understand when starting out (I didn't way back when), and I think is a point worth noting.
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Happy to make edits if there's ways I can clarify this better. Gotta ship something before EOP today but will revisit the article tonight.
West coast capital is significantly less interested in the what and how than other sources of capital in my experience.
I'm a long way from the West Coast so correct me if I'm wrong here, but I've always had the impression that they are very interested in the who even if not so much in the what and how. Stories of founders of profitable businesses being replaced for less-than-hyper growth abound.
What is your point again?
Either way, you will always be at the whims of your customer. So why is that a disadvantage when bootstrapping?
The wider point was: both bootstrapping and VC funding are good options, depending on your specific circumstances and goals at the time. One isn't objectively better than the other.