I'm not saying there's no place for VC, but I think it's been a big mistake to plug it into ideas that simply don't make sense for it. There's a reason my copy of "Nothing Ventured" has a pair of dice on the cover. VC is designed for high-risk high-capital projects (the Intels and Lyfts of the world), and yet we continue to use it for things it was never designed for, like low-capital web startups that don't really require a lot of labor and simply need to find a niche in their market (let's face it, it's almost impossible to predict your market beforehand).
The consequence is startups that are either an enormous success or a complete failure, with zero room for deviance. There's a big hole between enormous success and complete failure, and in practice the vast majority of startups land in it. When we don't provide investment devices that work for that middle area (but scale to potential for enormous success when discovered), it's no surprise to me that we assume 90% failure rates in the industry, and end up with startups that fly way off the handle, sacrificing sustainability at the altar of "growth".
The Indie.vc proposal IMHO fills that massive hole by allowing for the possibility of moderate success. If your company doesn't go IPO but still makes a profit, you don't get stuck in a trap where you're forced to keep raising money to prevent disaster (which you're dishonestly selling as a growth opportunity), sell (often an acqui-hire that shuts down a perfectly good business) or go into an asset sale to pay off the investors. Running on that treadmill destroys a lot of perfectly good companies.
Neocities is in this boat. We've turned down quite a few offers from VCs because the terms were too dangerous for us, and I'm assuming many other startups are in a similar place. We need some investment and help to grow, but I refuse to do that at the expense of our great users. They deserve better than to lose their sites because I used them as poker chips to gamble the size of our market niche. If we get big, great, but moderate success is great too. Today's investment devices are simply too dangerous.
IMHO, that's the way startups should operate, and that's the way our investment devices should work. Indie.vc is a really great idea.