Well, there are many paths I guess.

At Qbix.com we took the exact opposite approach. We are just in the Web / social networks apps space. But we reinvested half our revenues in new technology, for years, since 2011. Tortoise, not hare. Now we have superpowers. We can build anything, quickly, and we don’t need venture capital.

On the other hand, we have heard no from like 20 VCs over the years. We had 7 million downloads now, $1M in revenues but we were still “too early” ;-)

In the last few years we made pretty “altruistic” or “anti-capitalistic” moves. We open-sourced it (https://github.com/Qbix) and are exploring alternative financing to VC (ie actual paying clients worldwide). We are trying to build a micropayment network (https://qbix.com/token) that helps everyone, not just us.

So basically it seems totally backwards from the current VC model but is actually compatible with it. I remember being inspired partly by DHH from Basecamp, and others. Remember — this is your startup. Do you want to change the world? Innovate!