This article should have been called "The UK Needs An Acquisition Culture If It’s To Have a Sustainable Venture Capitalist Culture"
+1 to what anovikov and KaiserPro have said already -- If these founders are building things they love, to solve real problems, they should be building sustainable businesses and doing what they set out to do, not waiting on a VC to buy them out.
Thats fine for some. Run on revues and retire in 40 years satisfied. But sometimes other founders need financing to build the things they love, and that require capital. European banks are not good at risk capital. So you're going to have to get it from somewhere. If eventually a founder has a big exit, maybe they can finance their OWN NEXT STARTUP? How about that for you?
Without being combative, who, exactly needs the financing that badly? Certainly not the large percentage of social startups, right?
And also, if they need the capital to enable/manage growth, a reasonable business model should get them SOMEWHERE close to sustainability. What I mean to say is that if people are falling themselves to use your creation (so much so that you must expand infrastructure significantly -- keep this in mind that many of the open source software that is available these days "scales" to thousands if not millions of users without much more than one guy sitting behind a computer) it should not be difficult to get some portion of people to PAY for the service.
Now, of course, this is very different when it comes to something like a manufacturing-based startup, in which someone is looking to achieve mass-production from the get go (which I don't even think is a reasonable approach) -- or break into some sort of heavily "regulated" area and needs money for patents/licenses/whatever. But even to that, I'd say more introspection is needed -- VCs are not just looking to hand out money without prototypes, and if you have prototypes that are good, and work, and show that you know what you're doing, even regular banks can give loans with a good enough business plan (especially with all that internet money everyone's been trying to get a hold of recently.
Also, I think that maybe this ultra-transient mentality to startups might be wrong, unless you are in the business of incubating. You don't often enter relationships with the mindset of gathering experience for the next one right? Most people would like to think that people enter relationships with the intention to make them successful. I think startups are the same way, especially given how people think about them on sites like these and others.
Also, keep in mind that building something you love and making money from it instead of taking VC cash doesn't mean you'll be poor by a long shot, it's very possible (and I'd like to say probable, but I don't have a link to an article posted on here last week about non-VC exits being generally worth more to the founder). If your idea really is good, then it will make you a LOT of cash, even if you collect $10 from 1000 people on a yearly basis, you'd only need 3000 people to think your app is useful to make somewhere close to min wage in the US (which is higher than many around the world are paid)
But anyway, that's just my opinion
[EDIT] - Also, another point worth thinking about here -- what about your users? These are the people that subscribed to you, your methodology, your culture. I think there's more than enough proof out there to show that users don't get quite treated the same after acquisitions (to put it mildly)
+1 to what anovikov and KaiserPro have said already -- If these founders are building things they love, to solve real problems, they should be building sustainable businesses and doing what they set out to do, not waiting on a VC to buy them out.