USEFUL ROLE MODELS - LIFESTYLE, SMB & VC STARTUPS

There are three degrees of success/failure for Entrepreneurs & Startups:

Venture Style - $10 million+: High-growth VC-style startup that can make you - and your startup - hundreds of millions, even billions. But this kind of startup requires a lot of time and effort in the process of fund-raising - taking your valuable time & energy and money & resources away from building your product/startup.
Small-to-Medium sized Business (SMB) ($1 million to $10 million) : An SMB is a profitable business that you can build without venture capital but that still takes a lot of work and grows much slowly than a VC startup. It can drain you because both your business & your employees demand a hands-on dependency on your ability to plan and execute the strategies.
Lifestyle Business: ($100k to $1 million): You can replicate the income from your day job working for yourself and have a lot of time to enjoy a lifestyle - family & work-life balance, travel, other hobbies.

We are startups founders who want to learn by osmosis from a close interaction with others in our shoes, minimize each others' mistakes and help ourselves succeed.

Perhaps your dream is to own a lifestyle business where you’re the boss of your business that lets you earn a few hundred grand a year - until you choose to get acqui-hired by Google or facebook.

Or perhaps you aspire to at least reach SMB status where your handful of employees can take care of business when you are on a month-long world tour - a business you can some day sell for a tidy sum of $5+ million in 2 years.

Or maybe you have made it past both those stages and are aiming higher - a $100 million or a billion dollar company that can compete with the big boys - likely needing Venture Capital to grow.

It is up to individual entrepreneurs to define the business of their dreams. We want to learn from each others' successes - and failures - with or without Venture Capital. AE members range from the rookie first time bootstrapping entrepreneur who doesn't have money, to those who have bootstrapped startups generating revenues from $100k to over $60 million, and of course, successful serial entrepreneurs who have successfully sold their previous companies - some with or other without VC funding.