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Very true. To build on this: -They define any business under 1 year old as a "startup". Is a new gas station a startup? A new cleaning business? A new home he
by krschultz 16y ago
Very true.
To build on this:
-They define any business under 1 year old as a "startup". Is a new gas station a startup? A new cleaning business? A new home healthcare franchise? These are all new businesses run by entrepreneurs, but they are not "startups" in the way we generally refer to them on HN. I know several family members that have these kinds of franchise businesses and they never refer to themselves as owners of startups, but as owners of small businesses. Small distinction but lest the VCs and hackers say they create all the jobs, realize that the companies doing "established business" they so look down on are counted amongst startups in this data.
2) Common sense defeats their numbers. Who starts a startup with less than a year runway? That would be ridiculous. If they change their numbers to count startups up to age 3, what would this look like?
- c1sc0 16y ago"These are all new businesses run by entrepreneurs, but they are not 'startups' in the way we generally refer to them on HN." Isn't that just a matter of semantics though? Would s/startup/newly incorporated business/g do? I agree that their definition of startup certainly skews the statistics. More interesting would be "Sum of total job-years by startups vs. established companies".