>Additionally, the danger, and it's what gives VCs power, is that your lifestyle business ends up having to compete with a VC-funded machine-gunner.

Really? You fear VC?

I fear my established competitors coming down on price faster. I fear the new entrants (who are cheaper than I am) developing a better reputation. Most of all, I fear screwing it up myself; really, that's the only thing that will kill me fast.

VC funded companies are not even on the radar. If you have offices on castro street, or university ave? as far as I am concerned? you may as well be on another planet entirely. It's like companies that sell to big corporations, you know? Yeah, they can marshal huge resources... but they also have the pricing power to take absolutely tremendous margins. The people I know how to sell to? they don't even want to look at. The markets that I want to dominate? they are so small, that nobody real cares about them. (I mean, I would like the wider market, too, but if I really earn the market I want most? even though it's tiny, it's absolutely huge compared to my needs.)

Generally speaking? VC and sole proprietors go after different markets. We want different things. And we are good at different things.

>The difficulty in starting lifestyle businesses is that you have to put personal savings on the line, and our generation (as a whole) neither has that nor is likely to get there-- ever. You put a lot more on the line when you start one of those than you do when you take a check from a VC.

Maybe? either way, you are going to be putting years of your life into something that is probably going to fail. I guess with VC, you have a better chance of getting paid something, and you have a better chance of not having the debt follow you after the thing does fail, but eh, the real cost in both situations is the years of your life you spend.

Really, maybe there is something to the VC "fail fast" attitude, rather than what I describe as "the slog" - long years of living on sustenance wages, pouring the difference into your company.

If I had the last 10 years of my own life back? My slog, the time I spent pouring all my excess effort into this sort of thing? I don't know if I would do it. I might just stick with a dayjob, and get a hobby or something.

Or, maybe I'd do a VC-style "fail fast" - try an idea for a few months, then write it off as a failure if it doesn't come up during that time.

I mean, I don't have those 10 years to do over; I have the result. A bunch of servers, a bunch of contracts, a bunch of customers. A living wage, (but still like 1/3rd what google would pay me) and a bunch of contacts.

I am in a state where the only option is forward; I can't quit now or I lose 10 years of work (and a company with north of a quarter million in revenue isn't nothing... I mean, if I sold it? yeah, it's nothing. but it's a point from which I can try other things.)

So yeah. I am moving forward, (and I have made dramatic changes; other people (not VC, technical people that I know and trust) now own parts of my company. This is /huge/ - a big part of why I went into business for myself was to be my own boss, and I'm still the majority shareholder? but for the first time in a long time, I answer to other people. It is.... very different.) But, you know what? after those ten years? I am not so sure I agree with your statement that starting a business with your own resources is better than taking some idiot's money. It's certainly not easier, and worst of all, there is nothing to say "You have failed, go home, get some sleep, and go get a real job." which is the real danger. With a reasonable lifestyle business, assuming you can create value with your labour, well, you can keep going at this half-success level, really, forever. There really is such thing as being too persistent.