[rsp1984]

What a lot of people miss (including the author) is the time factor. Yes you can bootstrap a business and grow things organically once you have found decent product/market fit. The problem is that it will just take a much longer time until you reach certain milestones than with a VC-based approach.

"There is perhaps no better example of this other way than MailChimp, a 16-year-old Atlanta-based company that makes marketing software for small businesses."

This just kind of proves the point. If you have a company with great product/market fit and lots of VC in the bank you would either reach their numbers much quicker or have higher numbers after 16 years of operation.