You want a life-style business. And that is absolutely fine. Investors want you to be very busy, scale the business and build a large company. Is the only way they can make their money back.
(I work for a venture fund in Dubai)
A non-funded company is not by definition a 'life-style business'. That's pretending there are only two choices whereas in fact there is a huge continuum ranging from mom-and-pop operations all the way to enormous privately held conglomerates.
If you work for a venture fund you should know that the choice is slightly more complicated than funded and life-style businesses.
Being 'happy' does not mean someone wants a 'life-style' business, it simply means they want a healthy work-life balance and that says nothing about the eventual size of the company.
Who doesn't? In the end, everyone is choosing a life-style. Life-style decisions should be the first and most important motivating factor for engaging in any business activity - not money, not growth. Life-style. Money and growth and all the tangible business indicators are at least an order of factor away from the real reason folks do business.
Folks wanting the venture funded path are also choosing that particular life-style: that of a pseudo-employer/boss with expectations and salaried "at-the-coal-face" employees arrangement. If this is what makes them happy, they are in it as much for that particular life-style.
You get what you want. Happily.
The problem with the phrase is that it's become an insult in many corners of the startup world, as if bootstrapping a business on your own to survive decades is not ambitious enough.
The parallel I thought of is getting in shape: becoming a body-builder (by living at the gym and taking steroids) or just be in good shape (by eating healthier and exercising regularly).