To me, "lifestyle business" does represent a certain subset of businesses, but tends to be used, as you said, for any company that is not raising money to go for the big exit.
In my opinion, "lifestyle business" implies that the business is done to generate cash in a regular manner with little input. The business itself doesn't matter so much in the end and the main goal is to sustain the revenues rather than necessarily expanding the business. This is exactly what "The 4-hour Work Week" is talking about. Real-estate investments can be like this as well.
On the other hand, you have bootstrapped businesses like 37signals, GitHub or plain web/design agencies which tend to be wrongly lumped into this category. If these were lifestyle businesses, then any store owner, plumber, contractor would have a lifestyle business as well.
On an unrelated note, it seems very premature to put Path.com in the same category as Twitter and Facebook.
In my opinion, "lifestyle business" implies that the business is done to generate cash in a regular manner with little input. The business itself doesn't matter so much in the end and the main goal is to sustain the revenues rather than necessarily expanding the business. This is exactly what "The 4-hour Work Week" is talking about. Real-estate investments can be like this as well.
On the other hand, you have bootstrapped businesses like 37signals, GitHub or plain web/design agencies which tend to be wrongly lumped into this category. If these were lifestyle businesses, then any store owner, plumber, contractor would have a lifestyle business as well.
On an unrelated note, it seems very premature to put Path.com in the same category as Twitter and Facebook.