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Comment by arexxbifs | Hacker News Reader

> a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup

Has the word "startup" simply replaced "company"? I'm thinking we should at least draw the line at a full decade.

I have recently interviewed at one of the largest, oldest educational institutions in the US, and also interviewed at one of the largest tech companies in the world. Both of them used the phrase “want to work at a startup?” in the job descriptions and both hiring manager said something along the lines of “we have a great startup culture”.

At this point the word is meaningless to me. If anything I have noticed that “we are like a startup” is really code for “we are incredibly disorganized and chaotic but for some reason we are proud of it.” Any time something went wrong with one of these companies (was late to a meeting, forgot to attach something to an email, etc) the excuse was "sorry, that's just how it is working at a startup haha!"

I recently had an interview at Mozilla. I remember the interviewer responding to one of my culture questions with "We aren't a startup by any measure... Firefox is one of the oldest software artifacts on the internet still being maintained."

+10 for candor

I do consulting and have worked with clients ranging from 3 person seed stage startups to Intel and Nike, so pretty much the whole spectrum.

Really the only difference to me is that startup executives treat your time like it doesn't matter, 100% of the time. At bigger companies, we will schedule a meeting and talk about something. Many of my small inexperienced clients just send Slack messages one after the other at 6PM on a Friday that make no sense and clearly have no thought behind them beyond "this worked for my friends startup, lets try the same thing!!"

It just feels like 95% of startup founders I meet nowadays are so scatterbrained they can't communicate and will certainly never prepare for anything, all while expecting their employees to always be 100% prepared.

Today I learned: My father is a start-up exec.

You have a "startup culture" (because there are sodas in the break room).

I am a "full-stack developer" (because I once worked through a React tutorial).

Recruiting and interviewing is a crapshoot, all around.

Marketers are great at diluting the meanings of words

Often people use the word "startup" simply to mean "private company which plans on an IPO but hasn't had one yet" (as opposed to public companies, and private companies that have no plan to ever IPO)

Sometimes a private company can take 10 or more years to reach the IPO stage. This is probably especially true for bootstrapped companies which can grow at a more steady pace than those VC-backed from very early on

Startup has been used at least somewhat frequently for public companies as well. I’ve seen it used with tech companies that have been public recently. I think I’ve only seen it used on public companies that are losing money. So at least that part seems to be consistent. Still though, makes the word diluted.

This definition seems to reflect usage. The question then is: what is the operational difference between a company aiming at an IPO, and one aiming to maximize the total expected profit (that is, every company)? Or is the difference just in intent?

Most enterprise startups take 7+ years, so yep!

Startup seems to mean a company that still hasn't found a way to survive without ever more VC money.

It’s a shame really that the meaning has been diluted; there are startups worth over $1 billion (not funny money, realistic multiples of ARR based on an arms length offer for shares) that are profitable, and startups that are a VC furnace and will never turn a profit.

Startup was originally meant to describe a company trying an entirely new business model. If there's nothing new then it's just a small business (until it graduates to medium/large/public/etc).

Unfortunately the venture capital industry decided to just call everything they invest in a "startup" and the usage grew from there.

Startup is a company with unproven business model.

Barbershop on a corner is not a startup, it is known how this works and what it takes to make it profitable.

Barbershop in World of Warcraft or some other MMO which makes haircuts to your virtual Orcs is a startup, cause no one knows if this is viable as a business at all.

How is an advertising driven website not a proven business model?

Every website has different ways of acquiring traffic. Quora's way of doing business isn't yet shown to be self-sustainable, which makes their business model unproven.

Startup at this point is effectively shorthand for a company that is growing but doesn't have a firm business model

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