Ask HN: Why don't more entrepreneurs focus on lifestyle businesses?

Perhaps it has to do with personality. People who don't need to brag, go about building their lifestyle biz. Others are driven by their ego and need for recognition, etc.

Unpopular opinion: if your company is going to succeed, why do you need VC? Sure, (nearly) every really really big company pulled VC at some point, but this is an industry full of survivor bias - and VC's know full well that almost all their punts are going to fail. VC is, arguably, the most expensive money you will ever borrow. If you could borrow a couple of hundred K against, say, obscene house prices in San Francisco it would save you multiple millions down the road.

Unpopular opinion: if your company is going to fail, you need VC money. This, to me, is one of the biggest problems facing our entire industry. The 1/20 that succeed have to carry the 19/20 that want to be cool and have bean bags in their office.

The (smaller) VC's have to, ideally, find that little narrow gap between a self-funded startup starting to "go" and the time when the founders decide they can live on a quarter million a year and be just fine. To be frank, it sounds really hard and I don't envy them the task. But they do get to charge 2% for doing nothing and I could do with some of that :)

How can we create a VC industry that's focussed on more, smaller wins? Perhaps a focus on recurring dividends? Or does the math work out that there is simply no point because the big wins are so, so big?

Big Tech is more visible precisely because it's big. But everything I have read suggests it is the tip of the iceberg. The majority of businesses are small and fly below the radar, so to speak.

I'd argue that the industry tends to swing between larger venture startups to constellations of smaller 'lifestyle'/bootstrapped businesses as technology shifts, in cycles.

The VC capital flows in when there are hard and expensive problems to solve in emerging tech spaces that need a lot of innovation or heavy lifting and, hence, financial runway to survive.

When the tech in the space gets cheaper, the cow paths have been paved and the tech becomes more accessible, it becomes more viable to bootstrap your way into the market. The get rich quick gold rush starts and then everyone floods in to find niches in the market they can fill on their own.

Eventually the bootstrapped businesses fill all the niches they can, the market becomes saturated and it's no longer lucrative or easy to bootstrap in that space. And the cycle begins again