Name me an entrepreneur who bought out the venture capitalists backing his nascent company because they were (allegedly) interfering too much and holding his business back?

Evan Williams did just that with his ailing podcast company, Odeo, now renamed Obvious. It was a counter-intuitive move that has nevertheless made him something of a hero among the indie startup crowd who want to stay in control of their businesses.

He says : “It’s about building Web properties that are interesting and worthwhile and potentially make money but are not runaway YouTube-like successes or considered a failure.”

It’s that either/or that drives the gambling instinct behind venture capital. The excitement of picking a winner, the shrug when a loser goes down. Who cares? It’s other people’s money anyway. And the next YouTube will cancel out all the losses in any case.

But there are those who don’t want to be packaged neatly for sale or an IPO. They just want to run their businesses. Evan Williams is one of those and put his own money where his mouth is.

Mark Pincus, whose company, Tribe, hasn’t prospered despite $9.5 million in venture money, said of Williams : “He comes off like a folk hero to other entrepreneurs. We need a model that allows for more experimentation and play.”

The New York Times comments : “The relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs has always been somewhat contentious. When things go well — think Netscape, eBay, Google — everyone gets rich and ends up happy. But often, entrepreneurs struggle with venture capitalists for control of their companies, grow tired of their demands and complain that their businesses get hijacked by financiers dead set on hitting a home run.”

Bootstrapping a business is the traditional answer, though not in fields that are capital-intensive. These days, because of the plummeting costs of hardware, software and bandwidth, it is possible to build a substantial internet company using careful cash-flow techniques and funded by expertise and hard work rather than VC money. A credit card is vital in the beginning, but if you’re good at what you do and you have a sustainable vision, even that source of funding will fall away.

Evan Williams injected $2 million of his own money to buy back Odeo. It was cash he had from selling Pyra Labs — creator of Blogger.com — to mighty Google. Now he wants to have fun and be creative. Not everyone is in that position, of course. But he did it the hard way, and he’s being upfront about his mistakes and his vision of the future.

Syntagma Media was built in that way, largely because it started as a hobby or sideline, and as the future subject of a book on bootstrapping. Experimental though it was, it’s now taken on a life of its own and captured mine in the process. In the end, it’s the vision that counts and, broadly, it’s stayed on course and made some money. Even the book remains, moving steadily along the pipeline.

The Syntagma Story — How a Cashstrapper Became a Serial Magazine Publisher, is to be published by Dial Publishing next year.