See, the problem that I think people are missing is that VC funding is no longer a means to an end.

Implicit in your comment is that a company without VC funding cannot grow as fast as a company with VC funding.

That was true ten years ago when a lot of costs were unavoidable: Server hardware ,server software, and you had to build a lot of software infrastructure from scratch.

Now all that is cheap, or free, and what isn't comes with lease terms.

Thus, lacking a big pile of money is not an inhibitor to growing big fast.