> businesses turning out respectable multi-million-dollar-a-year profits without ever being a target for a billion-dollar acquisition.

Very hard at the seed stage to tell the difference between a business that will turn out to be a $3M a year business and one that will be a $80M a year business growing at %30 a year. That latter might easily sell for over $1B. ( After all $80M in profit is only a 13X multiple to reach $1B, and growing at %30/year means that's a cheap.)

I hate the term "lifestyle business", it comes from redefining "startup" to be a very specific narrowly defined form of startup of the kind that is popular in silicon valley in the past decade.