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I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!”

I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup. I think this is so true. A startup seems to imply that it will at least in theory become a business at some point. I bet that Facebook didn't even call itsself a "web startup" when it started out at Harvard until it started to spread and raised some real money. To call every little project that someone hacks together in a weekend a startup is a misnomer, similar to the tendency for founders to give themselves C-Level titles in their startup companies which consist of nothing more than a prototye and a pitch, rather than just calling themselves 'founders'.

alexitosrv 16y ago
So true. In fact, I also believe the word "founders" implies a glorified version of what at the end of the day simply are "authors", or to suit better this site: "hackers".
bluesnowmonkey 16y ago
Maybe we need a new word in the vocabulary for this employment category. It's hard to explain to people who ask me, "What do you do?" Well, I don't have a job exactly. I quit that in order to work full-time on something that I hope will make money someday. There is no legally incorporated business... yet. So it's not really a startup, but it's not what you think of as unemployment either. If I tell people, "I'm doing a tech startup," they go, "Oh! That's cool." And I count that as a successful social encounter.