Being profitable and requiring no outside funding is probably somewhat negatively-correlated with being a startup (because growth is often - though obviously no

Being profitable and requiring no outside funding is probably somewhat negatively-correlated with being a startup (because growth is often - though obviously not always - slower). I've always just used "startup" to mean a private company that hasn't exited yet. You just have to qualify this futher. So Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. are all categorized as "large pre-IPO startups."