VCs take a stake in the company and drive the priority towards serious growth. VCs don't want your company to grow sensibly and return their money, they want it to have massive growth or fail.

Bootstapping lets you run your own company along your own lines, you firmly remain in charge.

It's often summed up as to what drives your creation of the startup: being "Rich or King".

Bootstrapping means that you created your company without taking in any outside investors (from the idiom pull yourself up by your bootstraps). VC means you took venture capital money.

A successful bootstraped company generally starts smaller and grows slower than a successful vc-funded company but the founders get to keep all of the ownership. With the advent of cloud computing its getting cheaper and cheaper to bootstrap and it's making bootstrapping much more of a viable and attractive option.

Taking VC means you need to look for an out. In my mind that's the biggest difference. They don't want to invest in a company to take a portion of profit, they want you to sell your company or go public so they can cash out.

Also, when a company exits, a bootstrapped founder might make more money than a VC-backed founder.