It’s fine if they’re happy with it, but you then go on to again state that there’s some sort of objective failure here. There’s not. If you think that there is, you’re living in a bubble.
I put "failure" in quotes because they absolutely did fail in what they originally set out to do. Nobody raises venture capital to build a "minimally profitable and very stable" business.
Thinking about it like the old joke that "if you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."
Even if the outcome is desirable, it can be a failure if you started off with a different/bigger outcome in mind.
> Nobody raises venture capital to build a "minimally profitable and very stable" business.
You're not understanding the article. The point is to implicitly want to run a lifestyle business from the onset, it's just that you don't tell the investors that explicitly. So you do set out to raise (one round of) VC just to have a cash cushion and then continue on as if you're bootstrapoed. From the VCs' perspective, you've failed, while from the founder's perspective, you've succeeded. See the top comment from the user cj for clarification. In other words, it's a "hack" around the traditional thinking of VCs.
Don't patronize me, your comment would have been better without the asshole remark.
In fact, it's you who struggles with reading comprehension. All of the examples from the article are massively successful businesses, not lifestyle businesses.
An article about planning to build a small lifestyle business wouldn't focus on examples like Klaviyo or Zapier.
It's not about lowering ambitions or setting out to build a small business. It's about being more capital efficient on the path to building a big business. In fact, that's the entire point of the article: how you can potentially get to a huge outcome without losing control across many rounds of funding. Nothing in the article is tailored towards small lifestyle businesses.
I'm just saying that this would be just as much a "failure" as it would be for their investors.
I know I never would have quit my well-paid, enjoyable job to start a company if this was the outcome.