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I agree that some use "billion dollar company" as shorthand for all the things you mention (a great lasting company, solving a real problem, and making a real i

I agree that some use "billion dollar company" as shorthand for all the things you mention (a great lasting company, solving a real problem, and making a real impact). My point is that while it's often used as a proxy like this, it's a dangerous proxy because it's easily disconnected from the company's original mission(s). In this sense, it's an unhealthy simplification. Surely there must be a better stand-in for a startup's hard-to-measure progress towards achieving their mission than their valuation.

softdev12 12y ago
I couldn't agree more with your full post. It's almost become so obvious and cliche that people have forgotten why business exists. It's as if all the media hype puts the focus on the riches of the founder and not the value created by the product. Every once in a while you see a publication do a retrospective of a failed startup. And every once in a while you see a blog post from a startup that exploded. But the statistics are completely skewed with distorting the reality of startup success. Mentioning that there are now X number of billion dollar startups masks how many startups are simultaneously failing. I would love to see a study that showed the total number of inflation-adjusted billion dollar startups as a percentage of the total number of startups started over time. This percentage may actually be decreasing, even though the media seems to be suggesting that there's a tech bubble.