While I appreciate your point, this is a very flawed analogy. There are only a few thousand people in a position to shoot for an M&A each year, and a few hundred million people in a position to get hit by lightning. Relative to the number of adults in the U.S., very few people start companies that could potentially be scalable each year, and out of the ones that do, very few scratch the surface of basic competence. So if you do start one, and you're reasonably competent, your odds are actually pretty good.

I also disagree with the assertion that a lifestyle business is easier than a moonshot. In my experience, both take a roughly similar toll on your life, but a lifestyle business doesn't have the upside to make the whole thing worth it. In a software development industry, a family where both partners are professional can bring in > $250k in salary each year working regular full time jobs, which is a very cushy lifestyle. I see no sense in working 16 hour days for a shot at the same salary. If you work that much, might as well make it a moonshot.

To me lifestyle business is more about declaring that your values are in conflict with what you feel would need to be done for further growth for this company, at this time; not because it couldn't be done, and even if it couldn't you really wouldn't know until after you tried.

This.

To support your statement, it's worth looking into how many of the large companies today started out large -- and how many started out small and incrementally built up. The majority of successful large businesses started small.

That isn't to say they didn't take loans or types of investment to grow faster, once they already had a steady revenue base underneath them. But few succeeding in the jump from zero to 1000 headcount with Other People's Money.

Around the first dotcom boom, one of the characteristics of the destined-to-fail companies was that they tried to copy big businesses "are" like instead of emulating what those big businesses were like when they were small and starting out. Fancy offices, game rooms, huge perks, lots of headcount was a chief indicator of future doom.

A friend of mine played Fucked Company Bingo and used to bet on which companies would fail spectacularly based solely on whether or not they had press/web site touting their foosball table. She did extraordinarily well in the office pool, I've heard.

IMO, it's all happening again.

The poet Basho once wrote, "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." For startups, perhaps we should amend that to "Do not seek to copy what your target business is doing now. Seek what they sought when they began."

Let's be clear: It is vanishingly unlikely.

In addition:

"In my experience, both take a roughly similar toll on your life, but a lifestyle business doesn't have the upside to make the whole thing worth it. In a software development industry, a family where both partners are professional can bring in > $250k in salary each year working regular full time jobs, which is a very cushy lifestyle. I see no sense in working 16 hour days for a shot at the same salary."

For a talk I gave at Lessconf a few days ago, I broke down the numbers. Assuming 25% ownership in a startup which reached an $8 million dollar sale (which is much higher than most, as I'm sure you know), that results in less than $2 million post-tax.

I ran the numbers in the talk to demonstrate how much my business, Freckle Time Tracking, a most boring SaaS, would make in the same time period and beyond the 5 & 1/2 years of leisure post-3-year-lock-in. (Assuming a not immoderate spend of $10k/mo and savings of $5k/mo -- remember, if you get lock-in -- and most do -- you will have to work out of the Valley, where everything is expensive.)

My time tracking product alone will bring in significantly more than the buyout after 6 years, nearly triple what an $8 million dollar buyout would over a period of 9 years. And what's more, it keeps earning.

That's just one of the little "lifestyle" businesses my husband & I have going. We don't work 16-hour days. We don't even work 40-hour weeks. We did for about a year, year and a half, but we also took weeks and weeks off in the same time period.

Time tracking, let me repeat. Boring, "saturated," blah blah blah. Time tracking alone will make me us millionaires by the time I'm 30 -- on the side, and better yet, with 100% ownership. :)

And, as I said, we've got other things going as well.

Making an actual business with actual profit is different than what everyone calls a "startup" these days. You don't have to work your ass off. You just have to serve a market which needs serving, and provide more value than you're charging. These are different skill sets than hunting down VC and viral growth. More useful, in the end, and with a higher rate of return for the many instead of a few.

You are citing Dow Jones Venturesource exits. First off, they are tracking venture-backed companies. So your denominator in that particular fraction isn't people shooting for M&A someday-- it's a tiny slice of companies that get VC dollars. How many TOTAL VC backed companies exist? 5k? 50k? I honestly have no idea, but comparing it to people getting struck by lightning is just silly.

Second, you mention an 8 million dollar sale as your example. $71M was the median in those 522 exits (http://www.dowjones.com/pressroom/releases/2011/01032012-VCE...).

All that aside, I think this whole argument just shouldn't be happening. I think we're all in agreement that the funded path is higher risk and higher reward.

As for whether my number comparisons make good dialectic sense or not, it doesn't matter. This isn't dialectic, it's rhetoric. It's a tool for thinking about something. There's no point in pretending we're even attempting to approach Absolute Truth here.

As a tool for thinking about something, a contrast of M&As vs lightning strike injuries is quite valuable. Because we all "know" people who have been bought, but very few of us know people who have been injured by lightning. This shows us that we're in a bubble, a slice of unreality, where the availability heuristic skews our deeply felt understanding of likelihood.

Finally, yes. Dow Jones Venturesource tracks only venture-backed companies. Everyone on HN seems to agree that achieving venture funding is not only important for growth, but important for the connections the VC has to people who would buy the startup. Presumably that belief has some grounding in fact. This leads us to the conclusion that an acquisition is more likely when there is VC involved than not.

And yet it shouldn't be, because profit-driven tech businesses can still be scalable and have many of the advantages of true "startups". It's still much closer to a "startup" than it is to a brick and mortar operation.

On the flip side, people seeking viral growth probably should not be killing themselves with work either. If you love what you do and you are productive then maybe 60 hours a week is okay, but certainly it's not serving VC interest or anyone else if you're burning out. Personally I think if there were a guaranteed way to use the other 138 hours in a week as personal R&R that would result in an uninterrupted, in-the-zone, 30-hour work week, that would be a good deal for any employer of creatives.

When I write about "startups" (with quotes), I am writing a reflection of what most people (at least people who write, talk, and comment) believe. :) Not what I believe ought to be.