lifestyle business

Definition

A profitable company designed to generate comfortable income for its founders rather than pursue hypergrowth and venture returns. The entrepreneurial equivalent of choosing happiness over glory.

Example Usage

After two failed startups, he launched a lifestyle business doing $2M in annual profit—VCs wouldn't touch it, but his therapist was thrilled.

Origin

Entrepreneurship terminology distinguishing growth ventures from sustainable small businesses

Fun Fact

VCs use 'lifestyle business' as a pejorative, but many such businesses outlive venture-backed startups and make founders far wealthier with less stress.

Source: Entrepreneurship and small business terminology

Related Terms

Advanced

portfolio construction

The strategy for how a fund allocates capital across different investments, stages, sectors, and check sizes. The art of arranging your bets so at least one or two have to work out mathematically.

🚀 Startup / VC

Advanced

option pool shuffle

The practice where investors force a startup to create or expand the employee option pool before a funding round, effectively diluting founders rather than new investors. It's a clever way to pay employees with founder equity.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

exit

In startup land, the glorious moment when founders and investors finally cash out, either through acquisition or IPO, turning years of ramen dinners and sleepless nights into actual money. It's the entrepreneurial equivalent of winning the lottery, except you had to build the lottery first. Every VC's favorite word and every founder's obsession after their Series A.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

ARR

Annual Recurring Revenue -- the amount of subscription money a company expects to collect over a year, assuming nobody cancels, which they will. It's the startup metric most likely to appear in fundraising decks and least likely to match reality.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

Go-to-Market

The strategy for launching a product to customers, which in startup land typically involves a 90-slide deck, a Slack channel called launch-war-room, and a blog post nobody reads. It's called go-to-market because go-to-three-customers-who-are-your-friends doesn't sound as impressive.

🚀 Startup / VC

Advanced

reps and warranties

Legal promises in investment agreements where founders swear everything they've said is true and the company isn't hiding skeletons. Breaking these can result in personal liability, making due diligence the most stressful time to discover that intern you hired in 2019 never signed an IP assignment.

🚀 Startup / VC

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