To expand on that, even if you didn’t want to take the VC funded money and bootstrap your own business, the deck is stacked against you. If you compete in the same space, a VC funded company can do more marketing, develop the product faster, have more connections to important business partners because of large amount of money and connections they have.
And they will “outcompete” you at a loss, until the bootstrapped business goes under or settles for a tiny market share in a niche. So when they say, the economy is rigged, this is what they mean. You will need large amounts of capital to compete in the tech space. Even if you are two times smarter and work two times harder, you will never be able to compete with a VC funded company flushed with money in the same space unless you get reaaaally lucky.
Unlike other posters, I think this is not wrong. You see a lot of “hustle culture” over there as well as the general belief that if they work hard they can get rich. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another question.