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With respect, I think everything you said here is opinion. Slava responded to my comment arguing for the merits of Tarsnap augmenting the human condition instea
by dylangs1030 13y ago
With respect, I think everything you said here is opinion. Slava responded to my comment arguing for the merits of Tarsnap augmenting the human condition instead of saying it's not a startup.
That's not to say your rebuttal isn't valid, but that I think there's confusion of what really constitutes a startup. Was Instapaper a startup? It sold for an exit, but on the face of it I don't see how it inherently scales differently from something like Tarsnap.
I would define any budding tech company as a startup, though it might not be accepted by VC's or Y-Combinator because it couldn't scale. That's my own opinion.
- tg3 13y agoThere definitely is confusion over what constitutes a startup. But I think we can all agree that it's not just any small business. Some people use the definition of small tech company (as you have), but that doesn't meaningfully differentiate a company like BCC from Dropbox, which have very different economics. PG defined it in his essay on growth [1] and it seems to work pretty well. It also makes the OP's points about working on something that augments the human condition make a lot more sense. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html