Web Apps 101: Your Three Point Success Plan

"You should never plan on being acquired. Remember that getting bought for $1.65B (or even $5M) just isn't likely for 99.9% of web apps. Profitability should be your #1 goal."

A variation of this comes up all the time, and I would claim that it means he's not really talking about startups. At least not in the Paul Graham, "How to Make Wealth" (http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html) sense of the term. Presumably a startup taking investment is working toward liquidity for its investors, which in practical terms means acquisition.

Not that I feel this necessarily invalidates his advice (a lot of it had nothing to do with this). He never claims to be talking about startups. Web applications that are not startups can still make money.

It's just that I hear this often enough it's hard not to feel like I'm drinking the kool-aid on this one. What gives? Is there and unspoken "you can go for acquisition, but we need to to pretend it's really profitability you're after" thing going on? Certainly VCs would rather the former. Am I just bat-shit-crazy? Not that that's going to dissuade me from shooting for acquisition...