I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the doom-and-gloomers have a very narrow view of that startup landscape, and only really see consumer companies.
The real trend of 2013, IMO, is that the consumer space is dead, as far as new startups are concerned. Supporting evidence is the "series A crunch", the reaction to the Facebook IPO, and Chris Dixon's "10 million is the new 1 million" article.
However, startups in other spaces, notably B2B and "enterprise" (the new sexy as of very recently, and my prediction for the number one trend of 2013) should be fine. If your startup makes money and has customers, you'll have no problem raising money (and less problems going it alone).
[Supporting evidence: basically my own (limited) experience from fundraising over the last few months]
I don't think consumer space is dead. I think the mentality of "get users now, get money later" is dead. It was always a flawed philosophy. There's no guarantee that if you build a network of people, those people will actually want to pay you. (Case in point: Facebook.)
So I'm agreeing with your last point: "If your startup makes money and has customers, you'll have no problem raising money."
Agreed. People often use the term "consumer space" as if it only means some free app or product being given away for free ad infinitem... Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber, Kickstarter are all consumer services that all had huge years in 2012.
Dropbox is a particularly interesting example because it has a B2B counterpart in Box. Dropbox however is 2 years younger and about worth about 8x more. Consumer is certainly not dead. Free consumer maybe, but even then, Snapchat just showed us that VCs still have an appetite for free apps that skyrocket in user growth. (and appetite is an understatement.)
If only. I think that the business model of grow first then make money will still be vastly more popular than it has a right to be over the next few years and likely beyond. Though hopefully some of the sheen has been taken off of it.
The problem is that sometimes the strategy works, and sometimes when it pays off it pays off big. Amazon being the best example. And there will likely always be a continuous string of the strategy working, in a big way, for the foreseeable future. And that will create a much larger group of gamblers who think they can bet on the same strategy even when the business fundamentals show they have almost no chance of pulling it off.
Facebook is a weird example in this case because in some regards their business model was justified. They managed to create a multi-billion dollar, worldwide business in a short span. There's every reason to believe that they can sustain billion dollar per year profits for many years. However, they managed to sell their IPO on the premise of being a company that's almost 100x bigger than they are now, which is a bit of a ridiculous idea. Even if they gobbled up most of the worldwide ad budget it wouldn't justify their IPO valuation. Yet enough suckers bought into the idea that the company made a lot of money from the IPO and the stock price has even managed to rebound from its low this year, although to be honest I don't think that reflects a rational evaluation of the company.
As far as businesses targeting customers directly, I think that continues to be a big thing and is if anything only growing in popularity. For every instagram or facebook which tries to court hundreds of millions of users with free services there are a huge number of smaller companies who are selling services directly to customers at a profit. The rise of indie game studios and crowd sourced projects is an excellent example of this in action.
The real trend of 2013, IMO, is that the consumer space is dead, as far as new startups are concerned. Supporting evidence is the "series A crunch", the reaction to the Facebook IPO, and Chris Dixon's "10 million is the new 1 million" article.
However, startups in other spaces, notably B2B and "enterprise" (the new sexy as of very recently, and my prediction for the number one trend of 2013) should be fine. If your startup makes money and has customers, you'll have no problem raising money (and less problems going it alone).
[Supporting evidence: basically my own (limited) experience from fundraising over the last few months]