My understanding of Google may not be accurate, but my understanding of why people hand their money over to Google is probably as accurate as it is possible to

My understanding of Google may not be accurate, but my understanding of why people hand their money over to Google is probably as accurate as it is possible to be. Misunderstandings of any details you have in mind aside, in general Google too fits into the general idea: before Google started thinking about how to channel its technology to meet the needs of people with money, it was an interesting startup, but not a great business. The second it took the needs of customers with money into account, then those people handed over their money and that made Google a great business. My point is that in my mind there is a simple distinction that most startups seem to either accidentally or purposely ignore: startup = bunch of guys working on a cool technical thing / business = bunch of guys working on a thing that makes life better for paying customers. Having not seen Benny Hill since childhood, I assumed that the reason people were starting startups were to transition to businesses which made life better for paying customers. Apparently I was wrong. People here, for the most part, as well as just about every programmer I've run into over the last year or so trying to start my own thing, seem to be more interested in starting a startup so they could post "Hey guys, check out my cool thing" type of posts. I don't know where I'm going wrong here, but unless somebody finds a way to transform positive feedback from Hacker News into cold hard cash, that's not a business. At least not IMHO. But judging by the feedback I get on other posts, not too many people seem to care about starting a business, just starting "startups" where "startup" = somebody pays me money to sit around writing code and drinking Mountain Dew. I can't see how that's different from a job where you happen to be working on a cool project.