That said, I understand that the demographics of a site can change, and that's not always a bad thing. And there's still enough variety to keep me here.
Would you (or anyone else reading this) know of online communities similar to HN that are more bootstrappy in their focus?
What I mean is that absence from the media is not non-existence.
Yes on the risk, fully disagree on the reward part. And i am not talking about the reward of being able to focus on the business rather than raising money.
I am talking about cold hard cash. In a successful small business, many owners will make mid 6 figures, year in, year out, and still many will make 7 figures. After a few year, it beats a lot of exits. And there are many many more of those than the few IPO / big acquisition we can read about. Even with IPOs, the remaining share of the founder sometimes makes me sorry for them.
VCs don't publicize that though, understandably.
I do agree with you on the rest of the comment. The mean return for a highly leveraged approach is probably lower than the mean return for organic growth startups.
The VC story only matches a few cherry-picked examples.