To many people in the Valley, I believe, "running a business" means coding something and getting it out there. What you speak is a foreign concept. They'll never spend time marketing. They'll never process a payroll. They'll never deal with the myriad HR issues that arise when you have many different personalities co-mingling. They'll never scrutinize their financials. Hell, most of the time they aren't even concerned about making money.

But you'll see many resumes that read, ran X successful businesses. They can point to a website and say, "There's my business!" I can say from experience, the small-business pizza shop owner doesn't get to do that.