<i>When small start-ups I’ve spoken with do make money, they often find it difficult to recruit additional investment because most venture capitalists — and often the entrepreneurs they finance — are not interested in building viable long-term businesses. Rather, they’re interested in pumping up enough hype and valuation to find a quick exit through an acquisition at an eye-popping premium.</i><p>This highlights the difference between VC and bootstrapped firms. The VC expects 30-50% annualized returns. To get that you need hypergrowth. If you want modest growth, avoid the VCs. But they exist because there is a need for people to fund moonshots. They would rather have one business succeed with a 20x exit and have 4 fail, then have 5 firms exit at 2x.<p>Where I differ from the OP is I don't see this as a morality play. I see "getting an exit" as a way to redeploy risk capital. Once the business is stable, ownership should transfer from risk investors to more traditional one. Or to more traditional companies.<p>To get to Everpix - could they have succeeded if they just bootstrapped and focused more on Marketing earlier on? I don't know. I wish their founders well.