I think you may be misconstruing what actually happened in your two examples.
The majority of the tech innovation for Google's original search engine happened entirely without VC funding. Google as a search engine was already up, running, indexing millions of pages, and providing demonstrably better results than competitors by the time KPCB and Sequoia funded it in mid-'99. I distinctly remember the librarian at my school instructing us to use Google instead of other search engines in '98 due to its higher quality results. "Finances first" may still have held because running the original engine wasn't all that expensive and they didn't have a bunch of engineers to pay, so getting to profitability was not exactly a long shot.
In the case of Airbnb, you seem to have ignored that there was already a strong short-term home rental market in place before Airbnb came onto the scene. Homeaway and VRBO both predate Airbnb by several years and had proven the financial viability of the market. What Airbnb did was completely ignore laws and lease contracts forbidding hotel-style short-term stays, and combined it with an easier to use and search interface for both sides. Also, Airbnb had already proven the model before they took funding - they dogfooded it with their own apartment, then used the original 20K investment from Paul Graham to prove the business model before any large venture money was raised. This is absolutely a case where "Finances first" worked.
You have very valid points all around - but allow me to push on some of them a bit.
Even though Google's tech was built without VC, their consumer product and fundamental business were far from built and people had written off the entire web search space by that time anyway. It's kind of like if someone came to you today and pitched you something like food delivery with a better algorithm when nearly all major food delivery services today aren't doing so well and people have already developed strong biases against the space.
AirBnB isn't only a short-term home rental market though - it's a bit more cavalier of a product than that. Short term home rental does definitely exist on AirBnB and is huge but AirBnB also encompasses the spectrum between staying on someone's couch and straight up short-term home rental. The other difference is that it also covered massive areas that were traditionally ignored by hotels and other short-term home rental services. So in that sense, the VC money was needed to market the product appropriately, build trust with users through insurance guarantees, build liquidity in areas where it was a competitive advantage and do the legal/lobbying legwork. That's the real magic and that couldn't have been accomplished through a traditional finances first approach and certainly couldn't have grown so large so fast. Let me put it this way: whether AirBnB ended up as a cute hipster alternative to VRBO (which was playing in a tiny market) or whether AirBnB ended up as a straight-up hotel-alternative depended on VC money to believe.
The market is literally filled with companies that started with finance first and then grew more and more powerful.
Furthermore Airbnb is actually finances first as they had a business model from day #1 they weren't actually using VC money to find it first.
And google had their secret sauce before they got the funding.
The discussion I was trying to start though wasn't that you should never get funding but rather that way too many companies in my view uses funding when they don't really need it and instead could just start to charge.
By charging you are also more likely to solve an actual problem need people have rather than just giving the first fix for free.
The majority of the tech innovation for Google's original search engine happened entirely without VC funding. Google as a search engine was already up, running, indexing millions of pages, and providing demonstrably better results than competitors by the time KPCB and Sequoia funded it in mid-'99. I distinctly remember the librarian at my school instructing us to use Google instead of other search engines in '98 due to its higher quality results. "Finances first" may still have held because running the original engine wasn't all that expensive and they didn't have a bunch of engineers to pay, so getting to profitability was not exactly a long shot.
In the case of Airbnb, you seem to have ignored that there was already a strong short-term home rental market in place before Airbnb came onto the scene. Homeaway and VRBO both predate Airbnb by several years and had proven the financial viability of the market. What Airbnb did was completely ignore laws and lease contracts forbidding hotel-style short-term stays, and combined it with an easier to use and search interface for both sides. Also, Airbnb had already proven the model before they took funding - they dogfooded it with their own apartment, then used the original 20K investment from Paul Graham to prove the business model before any large venture money was raised. This is absolutely a case where "Finances first" worked.