“I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. I once wrote that every entrepreneur’s dream is to succeed at building an impossibly hard business and then finally open a local coffee shop to be happy.”

When I was in grad school, the unstated assumption in most of what we were taught was that the sole point of a business (or any institution, really) was to grow. To grow, grow, grow, to as large a scale as possible. To build an empire, take over the world. My classmates — tycoons in waiting — lapped it up. “Lifestyle businesses”? Nah! Those were fo... See more