If the idea is great enough for me to devote my life to, it's great enough to be able to do it without involving VCs.
That said, there are certain types of ventures (that I don't happen to be interested in) that require enormous sums of initial investment. That's where VCs can be genuinely useful.
But it isn't how most companies that take VC money are.
Let's look at a large number of YC launches we see on here. Often they're 1-2 years after they joined YC. They took 1-2 years to get to launch with a team of employees. Sure, they had customers before the launch but really at that point it was still lets see what works and experiement and change ideas and whatnot.
I'm currently trying to bootstrap a source-available SaaS Subscription and Billing software. I've taken 3-months to work on the MVP by myself and still not got a MVP ready. (Almost there, working on final stuff like documentation and whatnot) Not many people can commit to that long before seeing if the idea is going anywhere. There are quite a few people who can't afford to work full time on their bootstrap idea for 3-6 months without an income.
3-6 months?
In my ventures, the quickest I've seen meaningful personal income from them has been 2 years!
Typically, I have either saved up a "warchest" to get me through that time, or I've had a second job, or (most typically) both.
To be fair, seeing some income feels way better than seeing none. And if you're seeing growth it's another thing too.
When I'm starting a business, I view it as an exercise in delayed gratification. I'm not expecting to make any money in the early stages. Instead, I'm expecting to make up for it in what I make in the later stages. It's an investment in that sense.
Seeing growth, and seeing the company (not necessarily me personally) developing an income are important things through the whole deal, from the beginning through maturity.
But it's also allowed us to focus solely on the problems our customers actually have and will spend money for. It forces service/product-market fit before attempts to scale.
We are a services business so it is different than SaaS, but same principles apply.
There are benefits to bootstrap and benefits to funded. I feel as if bootstrapping first is a great way to learn the lessons needed to be successful when you do something funded later on.
Because funded companies have more chumps per dollar.
On the flip side, if you can't convince someone whose job it is to give out money to give you money, do you feel confident you can convince someone else to pay for your product? For me, getting VC buy in is proof that someone else thinks that there is money in the idea.
Why not? Those two things seem unrelated to me.