I'm not saying that small businesses are somehow worth less than startups. I'm saying that they are different in many ways: intent, team, sector. And because th

I'm not saying that small businesses are somehow worth less than startups. I'm saying that they are different in many ways: intent, team, sector. And because they are different, increases in the rate of their creation mean different things. My family includes people who run small businesses. I respect them and their place in the economy. Collectively, they employ more people than the mega-corporations. Those that are privately owned have the leeway to maximize values other than shareholder value; i.e. act morally. I'm into it. But most pizzerias don't want to grow to be Domino's Pizza. They're founded by people who like to build something at a certain level, be directly involved, and would rather not manage a billion-dollar company. When we say "startup" in SV, SF, or YC, the word means something, and that something is not a pizzeria -- right? But the New York Times is using the word in a different way than the community here. That's largely because startups are sexy and small businesses are not. Startup is a short word that fits in a headline, and small business is not. So the headline is misleading to readers here, even if the misdirection wasn't deliberate. It may be difficult to distinguish startups from SMBs in the statistics the NYT reported. But we all know that startup creation is pegged to things like VC funding. It might even be inversely proportional to megacorp engineering salaries, for all I know. But those factors have almost zero to do with the pizzerias, which are probably tied to banks' willingness to make loans, the growth of cities, the price of supplies and employees, etc. I'm not saying that startups are better than SMBs, just that conflating the two is not very enlightening.