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Some SMB's that I have met over the years are great at pretending they don't have money when hiring but are very profitable. I think that fits the "bad company, no financing" and is worth mentioning.

This thread is interesting because we're talking about success for different people. Success for the founder? The money? The employees? The answers are relative to the stakeholder we're talking about.

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Success as a product company relative to others. I'm talking about simple selection bias.

A no-financing company with a decent head count is probably in the top 1 percentile among peers. Chances are they're delivering real value.

A VC backed startup hiring a bunch of people is perfectly average. The top 1% for startups would probably be post-IPO/exit/very-late-stage.

So it seems perfectly normal to me a VC backed startup in most cases will look like a total trainwreck compared to a bootstrapped company of the same size.

The vast majority of bootstrapped companies die before they even had a chance to hire anybody. Unlikely you'd ever have to deal with them.

Yea, that's a really insightful take and I didn't take that into account when I was thinking about this earlier. Appreciate your take!

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