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Comment by kornakiewicz | Hacker News Reader

What does 'a lifestyle business' mean, anyway?

It's what is known outside the VC / startup scene as "a business".

It's a business a person starts to provide a reasonable level of income to themselves and their family, to maintain a certain lifestyle.

This generally refers to a business setup specifically to throw off enough cash to support a certain lifestyle. You never plan to sell or IPO. The main goal is to tweak process until it essentially runs itself with only occasional oversight from you. The level of lifestyle (and cash) you want decide how long that will take you.

Author here. For us it means optimizing for happiness instead of profit. More practically speaking what we do is ensuring everyone has a sufficient base salary, but then also participates in a quarterly bonus program (profit sharing). But the key is actually that everyone can work from wherever they want and as much as they want (as long as it is properly planned in advance). And then on top of that we organize fun retreats like spending a month in Cape Town or Martinique, or going skiing together in Austria or just a few days ago we went together to the Italian Alps for a week of hiking.

So this is what lifestyle business means for us: having a good time with great people.

I think that's a good definition. One often sees "lifestyle business" used as some sort of code for not paying very well but, at the end of the day, not having appreciably more flexibility or lifestyle-related benefits than any other small business.

Nothing against small consulting/design/etc. small businesses. But if they're fairly typical, at least figuratively, 9-5 gigs in the office or at customer sites with a few weeks off a year, it's hard to see them as lifestyle businesses.

I would tweak that to say you optimize for happiness instead of growth. Oftentimes, profit will be far more important to a lifestyle business than a VC rocketship, simply because the rocketship can sustain itself through funding rather than profit, and a business whose sole purpose is to maintain a comfortable standard of living for it's employees is pointless without profiting.

how do you deal with kids/school? Do you take your kids along with you?

I personally do not have kids yet, but some of our employees have kids and even newborn babies. One of them just came back from a trip to Norway. It's all doable and probably less of a problem than people think :-)

I think they were asking you what do the parents in your organization do on some of these longer outings - do they come and bring their kids, come without their families, or stay home?

Got it! So I'd stay we've two groups of people in the company: those that like the freedom to spend it at home and those that like the freedom to go traveling. To answer your question: the retreats we offer are voluntary so not everyone joins. But we do have a group of people who are strong travelers and also having kids now and they just take them with them. This is however quite now to us and we're planning a trip to Martinique where we are considering hiring a nanny as well.

That's awesome. I think you're handling that really well. I suspect a lot of US-based startups use these things as a screening tool to not hire too many people with families/outside obligations. It's a perk on paper, but you're a "bad culture fit" if you can't do weekly happy hour or a week long retreat because you want to see your kids.

Are you hiring?!

Actually yes :-) http://mobilejazz.com/jobs

Depending who you ask it means anything from "I only work 4 hours a week" to "Not about to be sold to Amazon for $1.8b". My personal definition would be a business that explicitly has a goal of focusing on employee (and by extension founder) well being over profit margins.

Very well put! I see it exactly the same way :-)

It means I don't have to wake up to an alarm, have most things automated, work 4-5 hours per week, and live like someone who is retired.

After reading the article, that doesn't seem to be the case.

People optimize for different lifestyles, but what I described is a fairly common goal. The Wikipedia article on lifestyle businesses even cites The Four Hour Workweek.

That sounds like my maintenace contract. Sometimes you dont even need to start business to have good lifestyle.

I think in this instance it means not accepting venture capital, which gives them greater flexibility to travel.

Not accepting VC is more a side effect of having a lifestyle business than the aim.

A startup's main aim is growth. Most VCs won't accept an idea that doesn't have the potential to be worth a billion dollars. One amazing investment must have a 10x return to pay for the 9 shitty investments that failed.

A lifestyle business' aim isn't growth. It's aim is to provide enough money and use a small amount of the founder's time, so the founder can enjoy their life.

From the business pov, it usually means that it generates enough profit to sustain a person or family without growing massively or becoming a "unicorn".

Instead of shooting for a mega-exit, I think it's about using the business to just enable a certain lifestyle for the founders/employees.

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