The author, Farhad Manjoo, is romanticizing a bootstrapped business as "good" and (via his prosaic examples of restaurants and dog walking) dismissing the VC-backed businesses as "bad."

It should be obvious that the opposite can be true: a bootstrapped business can also be dysfunctional and a VC-backed firm can be disciplined with its money.

Bootstrapping is great strategy especially if you're company that doesn't benefit from "network effects" such as Mailchimp/Sendgrid. You acquire customers one at a time and offer a good enough value proposition for them to subscribe or pay. A lot of SaaS/enterprise companies and lifestyle businesses can grow that way.

Venture capital is really helpful when you need to deliberately grow exponentially faster than bootstrapping will allow because you're trying to build a giant footprint for the network effects. Snapchat is a good example of this. It wouldn't make sense to try to sell the Snapchat app on App store for $4.99 each so it can be cashflow positive and pay for programmer salaries. The first users of their apps were teens in high school and they can't just purchase an app like that without their parents' permission. If Snapchat charged money for the app, they wouldn't even know that teens were the leading edge of that trend. In that case, you need to wisely use vc funding to pay the bills while you grow the audience. Hopefully, Snapchat will end up profitable like Facebook instead of losing money like Twitter.

If you're a "network effects" startup that insists on bootstrapping as the only funding, you will be beat by the competitors that are willing to live with $0 revenue for a few years while their equity financing allowed them to build their user base faster.

Schumpeter - History of economic analysis

Adam Smith - Theory of Moral Sentiments

Kaynes - The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Marx - Capital

Benjamin Graham - The Intelligent Investor

Galbraith - The Affluent Society

Galbraith - The Great Crash

Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom

Nassim Taleb - Black Swan

Ron Suskind - Confidence Men

Scott Patterson - Dark Pools

If you want to delve into heterodox economics afterward, start with the following:

Hayek - Individualism and Economic Order

Mises - Human Action

Rothbard - Man, Economy, State

I think Taleb's article could have benefited from some better editing. I haven't read him before, though, and I think I'd understand him better if I read more of his articles.