But limitless growth is never possible. Eventually you bump up against the limits of your market. If a business is aggressively trying to grow in a $100 millio

But limitless growth is never possible. Eventually you bump up against the limits of your market. If a business is aggressively trying to grow in a $100 million market instead of a $100 billion market, they are "limiting themselves". But they're still functionally a startup. Keep taking it down a notch. At what market size do they stop being a startup? It's fuzzy. As your target market goes from "everyone" to "doctors" to "radiologists" to "radiologists at research hospitals", you may be intelligently trading off market size for lower competition, lower marketing costs, and better product/market fit. What if you had a brilliant idea for a piece of software that would help discover oil deposits? I contend that you have all the ingredients of a technology startup, but it will be impossible to measure your business in the simplistic way the essay describes. There may be only a dozen customers in the world who are positioned to pay you what you're worth, and your growth is likely to be an impulse function: until the moment you get bought by an oil major, there's no growth to measure. His ultimate distinction is fundamentally fuzzy. Eventually, every business stops growing explosively. It's only a question of at which size it happens. And that size is necessarily a continuum.