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A startup is a company with a new type of product or business model. That experimental aspect is the salient difference from a vanilla small business. Having a
by idlewords 11y ago
A startup is a company with a new type of product or business model. That experimental aspect is the salient difference from a vanilla small business.
Having a brand new thing to offer the world often entails rapid growth (and the VC funding model demands it), but the idea that growth is synonymous with startups is peculiar to this here community.
- tptacek 11y agoI object to the idea that we should even concede "new type of product or business model". A startup is a new business. There was a brief push to qualify "startup" with "scalable", but the only people that seem invested in this (bogus) controversy are on HN, and HN just assumes "startup" means "scalable tech startup".
- idlewords 11y agoObjection sustained.
- jessriedel 11y ago(Of course this is just semantics, but let's indulge...) New businesses started up all the time over the past century, and there was never a need for additional terminology. People just said "I joined a new business" or "Bob started a small company". Why, then, did a new word "startup" develop? I'd say it's because people intuitively realized there was something about these businesses, which were largely tech and especially software, that set them apart from the existing idea of a new business. When someone starts a landscaping company today, no one ever calls it "a startup", and there's a reason.
- tptacek 11y agoThe word "startup" predates the kinds of companies you're talking about. It's been co-opted.
- jessriedel 11y agoDoesn't matter. The word "drone" meant different things in the past too (and was used much less often, like "startup"). What matters is actual usage, and whether that usage is sensible, i.e. "carves reality at its joints".
- tptacek 11y agoThere are two different groups of people using the word "startup", and only one of them seems intent on telling the other to stop.