Indeed, there are many other ways of building a business on-line than startups.

Makes me think, maybe it's time to create a "bootstrapped" badge, or something like that; something that sites that didn't take VC money could proudly display? At least for me personally, whether something is an investor startup or not is an important data point for deciding whether to invest my time in it.

VC money or not, isn't the issue. It could be a single guy with 100$ who built that, it wouldn't make a darn difference. I mean sure, a single guy running the site would have all of eternity to twiddle with it, but without PMF, the site isn't going anywhere.

I mean, the K-factor is either greater than 1 or it's less than 1. If it's less than 1, you can have 100s of years go by without gaining a meaningful audience. If it's greater than 1, then they would have seen that in their retention/cohort/signup analysis. Even, if only a sub-segment of their users were growing at a >1 K-factor, they would not have shut down. Since their shutting down, that's clearly not the case.

Funding here came (in part) from O'Reilly, who strike me as in it for the longer haul.