I wonder how you can grow a company without outside investors? Either you are a very rich founder or you can try to grow it organically but very slowly. If you attempt to do the later you'll find yourself in a position where is very hard to succeed, moreso if your company doesn't do anything new and the competition has lots of cash to succeed.
If you are in a internet business, you either charge users for the service or sell ads. Until now there's no better proven way to monetize.
If you intend to charge users for the service without selling ads, then you can do it regardless of how the money came to finance the business.
In retrospect, it seems like a bad business prospective from the start, with low potential. Had the potential been better, VC wouldn't force them to sell ads and wouldn't have tried to exit the business so fast.
Hard is fine. The point is, taking VC money makes building the company (you wanted to build) straight up impossible.
Turns out building companies is very difficult. If the first thing you do is sell out, perhaps you don’t have what it takes.
What if you and the venture capitalists are on the same page and have the same goals?
Or what if you keep control, have a good money making plan and you don't ask for funding just to pay expenses and acquire unpaying users but use those funds for growth?