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Comment by cowsandmilk | Hacker News Reader

Classpass was founded in 2013. Wonderschool was founded in 2012. Can we stop calling companies that age a startup? Or at least stop using them as examples? I mean, the article then goes on to call Airbnb a "home rental start-up". It isn't a start-up, it is over a decade old and has over 10,000 employees.

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I worked for a self-proclaimed "startup" that was 10 years old. At some point, it's really just another word for "we don't have our shit together."

Hahaha so true. The one I rebranded itself as "scaleup" around its 10th birthday when "startup" became untenable.

People often (wrongly) refer to pre-IPO companies as startups.

Chick-fil-a, the chicken sandwich 40 year old startup.

For better or worse, in colloquial American English, "startup" means a particular type of company, and is only weakly correlated with age.

To most of America, the term "startup" means a vaguely tech-ish company which doesn't know how to make a profit.

As a former techie, I strongly agree with that usage.

And sometimes a de facto scam (WeWork) or full-on scam (Theranos) because the investors caught FOMO fever and couldn't be bothered with due diligence.

The company I work for has been profitable from day one. I think we'd be proud to say then that we were never a startup :-)

The reason AirBnb is a startup is because it makes no money. A company stops being a startup when you aren't relying on someone cutting you a check every month to keep it all going.

Most of these companies will now fold. The number of employees or, even, revenue is irrelevant.

I still see Tesla commonly called a startup

I would have been in that camp. But it is probably unfair.

I still think the company is a dumpster fire but the big investments that Musk is making are, in part, driven by actual revenue.

...now that isn't wholly true. Musk seems to be able to keep raising debt without hitting equity. Over and over, he just finds utter idiots to keep bailing him out. The deal with the Chinese govt was incredible. Eventually, this will run out of road but the bankruptcy will show that Telsa did create some value.

I really hope this recession will bust AirBnB. It would lower the rents all over the world...

recession is going to lower rents. airbnb is not even a rounding error.

While I agree, I think the main thing they have in common is they're pre-IPO with intent to IPO, not just a privately owned company.

Indeed. Startup = entirely new business model. That's what venture capital is designed for.

Otherwise it's just a small business, until it becomes medium, big, public, etc.

Completely agree. I find the terms startup and scaleup as useful. Both aim for the same thing, but are in very different phases (pre/post business model validation). Then of course, in reality it's not that clear whether you're one or the other....

The term "start up" generally means any relatively young company (compared to companies that are multiple decades old) that's growing rapidly in revenue and/or valuation. The number of employees isn't as relevant.

While PG tried to redefine the term "startup" to include "growing rapidly in revenue" or whatever, this redefinition never took hold outside of a very limited sphere centered in Silicon Valley.

Outside of the valley, startup means a company that doesn't know how to make money.

And more precisely: any company that's young relative to incumbents / dominant competitors in the space (beyond a certain proportion, of course; a 99-year-old company is obviously not a startup even if compared to a 100-year-old competitor, but a 5-year-old company would be, IMO).

I personally think reliance on VC money is a more reliable indicator, though.

And yet we all know what they mean when they call those companies "startups". The term has drifted pretty far from its original meaning, but it does carry a new meaning even though it's almost completely different

It means they're VC-backed webapps from San Francisco?

Roughly. I would broaden the colloquial meaning to "new-wave tech companies". Ones from the past decade that aren't FAANG and maintain an agile culture (or at least purport to), and have a certain San Francisco sheen to them even if they aren't actually from there

I feel like you are now vigorously explaining that the other poster was right, that we should use some other name.

I'm not arguing one way or the other, I'm just observing that "startup" is an overloaded term in 2020, and maybe the new definition is a bit silly, but it's also really hard to get everyone in a society to change the vocabulary they've become accustomed to.

It's a bit like asking you to define just how many grains of rice there are in a heap. You may be unable to do so and yet know a heap when you see it.

Because investing in a .com would be bonkers.

> And yet we all know what they mean when they call those companies "startups".

That isn't true at all. These companies were startups almost a decade ago, but since then they already matured and strayed very far from the classification. This is like calling a 40yo man a teenager just because he was one in the distant past.

Another thing that's more than half a decade old is your objection. The term "startup" has come to have a broad meaning. The meaning of words changes over time. Fortunately, new terms often come along to fill gaps. In this case there is the term early-stage startup.

So "startup" now means "company" and "early-stage startup" means "startup". I look forward to having to call them "incipient early-stage startup".

I guess startup is generally understood now to mean a VC-backed company that doesn't make any money.

I think it’s more about the nature of growth potential. Hyper growth with a hockey stick is the measure.

Airbnb claims to make money.

Often, a "startup" just means a private company that plans to go public but hasn't done so yet (as opposed to already public companies, and private companies that don't plan on going public)

No, that sounds like a private company trying to sound trendy.

A startup has a small number of employees to start with and a 2 - 3 year window to go big, fizzle out, or pivot into a small - medium sized business. You're not a "startup" forever, nor does eventually marketing yourself as one, actually make you one.

I don't think so, because a whole lot of startups plan to get bought, not go public.

Start up has come to mean a company attempting hyper growth as opposed to a traditional business like a mechanic or brewery.

But what about companies that achieved that hyper growth (Google, Airbnb, etc). Are they still startups? How would you view this dialogue?

"I'm working at a startup".

"Oh? Where?"

"Google."

This just sounds like marketing spin. It's hip to be a "startup" because that conjures up the idea that the company possesses certain advantages over larger organizations, even if it doesn't anymore.

The definition is now so broad as to become meaningless.

The definition hasn't changed. There's a lot of misuse and abuse for marketing purposes.

I mean, sure, but the fact that the objection is old doesn't mean it's wrong. While I wouldn't say there's a clear cutoff point in terms of time or employees between "startup" and "not a startup," there's got to be some point at which we say "company X was a startup, but really isn't one now." Google was a startup, but we wouldn't call it one now any more than we'd call Apple a startup, right? How about Facebook? They're younger, they pushed that whole "move fast and break things" schtick. But with a billion users and worldwide offices and an actual corporate campus, I'm gonna say "no, not anymore," aren't you?

So I think it's fair to ask whether Airbnb, a profitable company with 12,000 employees and annual revenues of $3B+ for the last few years, can really be called a "startup" now. They were a startup. But now? Eh...

>>Another thing that's almost a decade old is your objection. The term "startup" has come to have a broad meaning. The meaning of words changes over time.

They use the word "startup" when it serves their interests. Yet, we don't call 10 year olds babies. Too bad

Companies are called start ups by people old enough to clearly remember when they really were just a start up, and haven't internalized just how long ago that really was.

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