I always assumed it was just me being overly sensitive to folks expressing concern over my life choices, urging me to snap out of my "mid-life crisis" and do something "useful" like raise money and scale up, or "apply myself" at famous institutions with "real impact".
Lifestyle business has benefits B1, B2, B3, and cons C1, C2, C3.
VC/PE talks a lot about C1, C2, C3 and promotes its business that also has benefits B1 and B2.
Amidst the deceitful noise, people forget about B3 and migrate to the VC/PE backed thing.
Lifestyle business folds.
Society/people lose B3.
This is not out competing. It's just bullshit.
This must be correlated with peer group and/or geography. I am in a mountain west city surrounded by skiers, cyclists and climbers. Lifestyle business is never mentioned in contempt, rather as a logical choice to support ones hobbies and outside interests.
In all honestly, to me you are one of the few people that come to my mind when I think of someone working on a project that's tangible and with "real impact". Precursor is so out of the box and cyberpunk and outside the confines of what institutions are working on
Hope in the future you get the support and validation that you should be getting
I didn't always have a rep -- the first step is the hardest in any journey, and the criticism was just as strong (if not stronger) back then. But, I was also a hardware guy in a software world. I'm stubborn, idealistic, and a rule-breaker, so I didn't fit in to any traditional corporate roles; no boss could manage me. That made it easier to walk out the door.
The most bold critics were always VCs -- not ones that I met with because I needed investment or anything, just folks I would run into at conferences or do an odd job for as a mercenary. You'd wrap up the job, and they'd make some quip about how it's a shame I'm wasting my talent in a "lifestyle business" and how I should consider finding some honest work at one of their companies. It was like some sort of weird negging tactic. I eventually learned to shrug it off but really, thought I was the only one who heard that term applied so pejoratively.
Thankfully, I had a few lucky breaks, and I'm very happy about where I'm at. However, it helps that I found residence in a place with affordable public health care, a functional pension system, oodles of public housing, and low taxes. No way could I do what I'm doing and also be so chill about my future without a functioning social safety net. Unfortunately, "just move somewhere that suits your needs" is not scalable advice; I wish I had a more practical blueprint for others who want to do a lifestyle business, but I don't.
That may all be a reasonable tradeoff but lifestyle business does get used as a rationale for a lot of things not all of which necessarily benefit employees. (Or maybe lifestyle business just gets used for a lot of things that are only somewhat related.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310733
It's disappointing to see, because the products were genuinely good.
I think emotionally non loaded interactions are possible here.
VCs are in the business of risky business. Their objective is to fund businesses that will grow very large or collapse very fast and where there is lots of uncertainty as to which and where money increases the likelihood of the former outcome. That's the thing they do. The mechanism that they typically use is a note that converts to equity when a certain raise condition is met either by the private or public market.
Someone who goes to them and offers equity in a profitable business that has no intention to attempt to rocketship or IPO is making a mistake. What exactly do you expect them to do here? Give you money in exchange for incredibly illiquid private stock that doesn't pay out? That sounds like a dumb deal. Only a moron would give you money on terms like that.
But that doesn't mean you can't get money. Small business financing is available from banks and the government. And you can do the typical thing of starting successful businesses and selling them off and climbing the ladder. Every day small businesses are sold for values from $1k to tens of millions. They're not valued the same as venture-backed startups because they don't have the same cone of possibility as them.
If you're going to a VC to fund a Ford dealership in Golden, CO you have to be an imbecile. Not because starting Ford dealerships is dumb, but because you're going to a basketball coach and asking him to teach you tennis.
Entrepreneurial people are rare. So when you go to this coach, and he sees you're athletic, he's more likely to say "Why not basketball?" and give you a hundred reasons you should play basketball. That doesn't mean tennis is a dumb sport. Or even that you wouldn't have a better chance with tennis. It means you went to a basketball coach and he wants you to play basketball because your success is also his.
For someone with this guy's reputation, he could easily run the business himself. And it's the same for geohot. He doesn't need venture funding to sell $1 million worth of AI at home devices. It's not contempt from the VC. He's found an athlete, and he knows how to coach basketball. So he wants the athlete to play basketball.
And proceeds to use emotionally loaded words like "moron" and "imbecile". No, the contempt comes from thinking that their way of living is intellectually(/morally) superior, hence, not a lifestyle. For perception of contempt, that's from not wanting their way of living to be seen as intellectually(/morally) deficient.
The very best VCs should be able to keep the contempt hidden, perhaps with profit rationalizations, like you, or moral rationalizations, like a dang, but I understand the curiosity to see if, when we put geohot+bunnie against 2 very equanimous VCs, which team will win the social media battle ;). Especially if we give your fave team a 1-dang handicap
This makes me wonder what other type of business is there? How do VCs describe their business, what is their aim? Is it to be 'king of the world'? Have more money than god? Have power to control others?
If that's it, lifestyle businesses sound much more human. Who wants to pretend to be god, rather than being oneself?
The other memorably awful/ macho bullshit line I once personally heard when pitching an idea to a young thruster was: “Who gets fired?” by which the guy meant, whose jobs are on the line if you build your business successfully?
Not all games are zero-sum, I had to tell him.
If they encourage a thousand lifestyle business bloom, one might turn into a boot-strapped "unicorn" that didn't take their money, so it's in their own interest to make lifestyle businesses seem like a terrible idea.
The more talented people are convinced the only way to start a business is with VC, the higher a value VCs can extract from talented people. If we actually had more socially acceptable options, more folks would have the leverage to walk away from the table and shove the VC's non-competes, non-disclosures, preferred shares and meddling board seats in their face.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/post-news-the-a16z-funded-...
Though I think there could be more to it than that: (1) the full development of that site would have required cooperation from the news industry that isn’t easy to get and (2) I don’t think they got the word out well because despite star-studded founders and investors and my being interested in that sort of thing (to the extent of doing market research and product analysis for that kind of thing) I never heard about it until the last week…. And that’s for a business much more interesting and innovative that the comparable Threads or Bluesky.
From the outside though it seems like 1.5 years is not a lot of time to exhaust the possibilities of growth for a site like that. (As I see it Reddit took more like 3 years for subreddits to become what we know)
On the other hand there are the zombie unicorns.
I have been watching Temu: I saw the ads, I bought what could be most of my halloween costume this year and two rolls of fox stickers (not sure if that was a mistake or a dark pattern) and a dragon figurine. Almost everything was smaller than I expected and afterwards I got a huge volume of irrelevant but seemingly personalized emails. I think they’re a paper tiger: I can be impressed by their advertising spend but they don’t seem like masters of marketing and algorithms to me.
The of course there is Uber and the other ride hailing and food delivery services. Uber has spent over $25 billion on giving subsidized taxi rides and there is no end in sight. Even at American prices, $25 billion could have built a lot of subway or light rail but Uber won’t leave such a legacy. Or if it does it will be breaking the economics of both chain and independent restaurants who have reshaped their businesses around a delivery business for which the economics doesn’t really work.
The strength of VC is it can make it bets like Temu and Uber but that can be very much a finger trap.
On one hand that seems like a great outcome to founders and VCs, but from the viewpoint of Facebook it is like extortion. I suspect Facebook uses every kind of influence it has to suppress the next WhatsApp because they don’t want to be doing that every two years or so, particularly when prices for things like that go up over time and not down.
"Lifestyle business" is what EVERYONE did back in the day before mega corporations. I come from a long line of shoemakers, tailors, and various artisans. All "lifestyle businesses". I expressed interest in following in their footsteps but my parents had sent me to college and always laughed at the idea of me taking up the family business. They had always felt it was too much of a hard life and as is typical for immigrants "wanted better for me". Ironically, artisanal work is now highly valued and I probably would be making far more money now (and have unbreakable job security) if I had somehow convinced my parents to apprentice me.
I suppose the closest thing to a lifestyle business in tech would be freelance consultants. It's more of a thing for certain people who typically have already spent a career in mega corps or VC-driven start-ups. I can't think of many people who have STARTED as freelancers-- other than some small number of academics.