[jasode]

>Companies like Mailchimp and Atlassian (in their early days) clearly qualified as startups even though they hadn't raised VC.

Even the Paul Graham essay defining "startups" the way he saw it said "VC funding" wasn't required: https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

It's just that many mentally associate "startups" with VCs and software tech because that's often how rocket-ship growth happens.