I'm really glad you have a third option there. Don't get me wrong, I love money and the things and experiences it can buy. But when I die, I want my life to hav

I'm really glad you have a third option there. Don't get me wrong, I love money and the things and experiences it can buy. But when I die, I want my life to have been about more than collecting the most toys. I want to create useful, beautiful things that improve the here and now for as many people as possible. A stretch goal would be for some of that work to outlive me. To me hacking and startups are a lot like music. I got into music because I liked listening and wanted to make my own. I went to music school because I wanted to be a better musician. The idea of making money was only a means to continue making music. The thing is, if you get very good at making music that enough people want to hear, opportunities to make money doing it will find you. The same is proving true with software. After some startup failures that involved putting the cart in front of the horse, I decided to just concentrate on writing good code and solving difficult problems that interest me. Instead of looking for capital, I've hunkered down in the middle of nowhere so my own funds will stretch as far as possible. A great deal of my work right now is open source. And so two interesting things happened this past year. First, other people showed up to help work on it. And then miraculously and completely unsolicited, someone came along and offered to pay me damn good money to keep working on it. If a few more do the same, I'll form a company, call it a startup, and find a way to deliver the value of this software as a service. Supposing it goes that direction, I wouldn't think of it as a lifestyle business, because I'd like to see it grow into something more than that. But I also wouldn't be thinking about an exit, because it's not at all clear if and when that would be a feasible or desirable outcome. Lifestyle and big exits are both just side-effects of making something that's valuable enough to other people that they'll part with hard earned money for it. That's the only goal that should matter to a startup.