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Paul Graham (and Y Combinator I guess) believe that the difference is the goals. A startup is a company designed to grow fast. PG, 2012 http://www.paulgraham.

Paul Graham (and Y Combinator I guess) believe that the difference is the goals. A startup is a company designed to grow fast. PG, 2012 http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2013/12/16/what-is-a-startup/#6b2321f14c63 http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2013/12/16/what-... a startup is a company designed to scale very quickly Steve Blank believes a startup is determined by the search of a business model. If you have a business model, then you have a small or new company, not a startup. https://steveblank.com/2014/03/04/why-companies-are-not-startups/ https://steveblank.com/2014/03/04/why-companies-are-not-star...

angersock 10y ago
Quite right. Another distinction worth making, almost its own axis really, is the difference between "a tech business" and "a business that uses tech". Companies like Cisco, Facebook, Apple, Google, Canonical, and so forth are companies that are tech companies--without their technology, they wouldn't be in business at all. They provide a service or product that is IP in its own right. Companies like Chipotle, Subway, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and so forth are companies that use tech to achieve economies of scale and growth that wouldn't be as easy otherwise but could still be done. You can imagine a way of making something that to the user is substantially like the Uber today without a complicated backend, even just using call centers and massive dispatch. The key part of their business is part-time contractor drivers, which is a business and not tech innovation. It's easy to assume that all startups are tech startups, but that's not quite true and it also can limit and slow developing a good business model.
- pzh 10y ago
  But then, can't you make the same analogy for early stage Google--basically, a big marketing firm that manually places ads in the yellow pages? Similarly, Facebook can also be executed over a phone system ("Press 1 to hear your friends' updates, press 2 to post an update...") I'm not sure there's such a strong distinction between a tech business and a business that uses tech nowadays.
  - angersock 10y ago
    Google's core beginning was PageRank (under license from Stanford), without which it would've been no better than similar offerings at the time. Additionally, their approach to setting up their equipment and making use of cheap gear and managing said cheap gear probably gave them a leg up...something they still do today at scale. So, no, you can't really make that analogy. Facebook was a tech company specifically, and not a company using tech, because the entire product was devoted to rapidly filling social profiles and spinning up the microsites that were user accounts, mining those accounts for information, and then integrating as a platform for advertisers and game developers. None of that tech is really stuff they could've outsourced and still had a business--they couldn't have just white-labeled MySpace for example and gotten away with it.

angersock 10y ago

Quite right. Another distinction worth making, almost its own axis really, is the difference between "a tech business" and "a business that uses tech". Companies like Cisco, Facebook, Apple, Google, Canonical, and so forth are companies that are tech companies--without their technology, they wouldn't be in business at all. They provide a service or product that is IP in its own right. Companies like Chipotle, Subway, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and so forth are companies that use tech to achieve economies of scale and growth that wouldn't be as easy otherwise but could still be done. You can imagine a way of making something that to the user is substantially like the Uber today without a complicated backend, even just using call centers and massive dispatch. The key part of their business is part-time contractor drivers, which is a business and not tech innovation. It's easy to assume that all startups are tech startups, but that's not quite true and it also can limit and slow developing a good business model.

pzh 10y ago
But then, can't you make the same analogy for early stage Google--basically, a big marketing firm that manually places ads in the yellow pages? Similarly, Facebook can also be executed over a phone system ("Press 1 to hear your friends' updates, press 2 to post an update...") I'm not sure there's such a strong distinction between a tech business and a business that uses tech nowadays.
- angersock 10y ago
  Google's core beginning was PageRank (under license from Stanford), without which it would've been no better than similar offerings at the time. Additionally, their approach to setting up their equipment and making use of cheap gear and managing said cheap gear probably gave them a leg up...something they still do today at scale. So, no, you can't really make that analogy. Facebook was a tech company specifically, and not a company using tech, because the entire product was devoted to rapidly filling social profiles and spinning up the microsites that were user accounts, mining those accounts for information, and then integrating as a platform for advertisers and game developers. None of that tech is really stuff they could've outsourced and still had a business--they couldn't have just white-labeled MySpace for example and gotten away with it.