I'm really curious how bootstrapping as opposed to VC money would affect this comparison. Not really much in the way of data I imagine though... I suppose it's hard to compare too. Big piece of a small pie vs small piece of a big pie kind of issues abound. Although HN has a very reasonable slant towards VC backed startups, I'm much more interested in bootstrapped startups.
I have some experience with both models. Bootstrapping is hard mostly because of sales, not R&D. I'd say a healthy model these days is to bootstrap the tech before you start investing in sales as much as you can. The danger with that is poor product market fit: most techies are not great at doing sales and marketing and you may end up building what you'd want instead of what your customers actually want.
For a no-tech company, getting techies to execute your vision is hard and expensive and generally impossible without funding or a very solid co-founder. You are basically talking about outsourcing an mvp to cheap consultants that aren't that great. The result is throwaway code. If you can sell that; great and you can then start fixing it. If not, that's a problem.
A few of the open core companies pre-date their VC rounds. I know one of the Elastic co-founders from before he got involved with that. The project was several years old by the time they incorporated and got proper funding. They were bootstrapping using consulting and support type stuff (this is how I met him). After getting organized, they went from a small group of contributors to closing several big rounds and hundreds of staff in a short time. Also from there to IPO was quite fast. I'd say this was a good example of bootstrapping followed by VC capital to grow followed by what looks like a successful IPO: they are trading at 82$ after an initial price of 70$, they have revenue, and growth, and what looks like a reasonable valuation to my (not an expert) eyes.
IMHO there's nothing wrong with VC capital provided you do it for the right reasons and on your own terms and not as a shotgun wedding. In my current company, we got close to a series A a couple of times but chose not to proceed for the reason of wanting to stay in control of our company and protecting the interests of our early investors. The flip side is that this has slowed down our pace and limited our ability to grow.
