Ben Chestnut sold Mailchimp for $12 billion to Intuit.

Big news, but there has been little media coverage and celebration.

You’d think there would be gushing stories and endless positive headlines about growing a business without outside funding. A rare unicorn of a big company that didn’t raise outside capital.

But no. Almost no encouragement for tech companies to grow with customer funding.

We get relative silence on this topic from what I call the “VC-Industrial Complex” that only pushes funding stories.

No VC funding = few stories.

The tech press and tech investors push this underlying story:
“The only way you can grow big, change the world and get rich is to take big equity funding.”

You’d think that it’s the only way to grow a serious software company. It’s not.

VC funding can be great, but it’s actually not great for most founders in the long run.

Most funded companies don’t pay back their investors at all, meaning life sucks for those founders.

Sometimes the equity funding “steroids” drugs to grow faster turn out to be not-so-helpful addictive drugs that investors keep pushing.

We don’t see press coverage about that.

VC funding can work just fine, but it is definitely not the only way to grow a serious tech business.