Title should be: I don't want to take VC money and I don't think you do either
It was the same way in the 80s with finance. Even though most finance workers were (and are) accountants working boring 9-to-5 corporate jobs, everyone assumed that anyone in finance worked on Wall Street and snorted coke off of strippers in NYC nightclubs every weekend.
It has taken me 5 years to bootstrap a niche b2b saas to $1m ARR. It is both awesome and terrible.
I wouldn’t really isolate the “day job” part here, it was sort of the quintessential dogfood SaaS.
Once you get a crowd, everyone starts doing what the people around them do. Its natural. It takes some time and experience to figure out whether you need to be there or not.
Do you guys not see this and introspect once in a while?
I don't think anybody in Silicon Valley would say the _definition_ of a Founder is someone who takes VC money.
All companies require capital to operate. All capital has a cost. In many high growth companies, the amount of time it takes to build a product and go to market has a significant effect of how much market share that company can acquire. Selling equity or taking on debt is how many companies can reduce that time and acquire more market share.
It just happens to be that the companies Silicon Valley is most interested in are companies that have to raise capital this way, with very very few exceptions.
Now more than ever, VCs will happily tell a a founder "your business is not a business that fits with the VC model well, don't raise VC money." The VCs who say that do not think the people they are are saying that to "aren't founders" - their business just doesn't need VC investment.