They are all around you. My business. Gravity Forms. Campaign Monitor. Harvest. Peepcode. Marc-André Cournoyer. WooThemes. Tick. Envato. Beanstalk & Postmark. And on and on and on. These are just some of the folks I know personally, in our space. I could name so many more in other industries. There are so many more, everywhere. You're soaking in it.

Most of these people are too busy making bank to blog about it (or they simply don't care to be recognized as business experts).

Why do you equate headcount with riches? As one of the richest people to ever write a business book, Felix Dennis says "Overhead walks on two legs." It was an important enough statement for him to include it at least 3 times in one little book. That should tell us something.

Employing people isn't a correlation to riches. Employees cost a lot of money.

As for "tech businesses"… Harvest has been virtually the same for years and years. So has my "competitor" to Harvest, Freckle. It doesn't matter. Your model of "tech biz obsolescence" is dependent on a winner-take-all scenario. Real business -- what you call "lifestyle business" -- doesn't operate that way.