I have a question which often comes up when I hear about "startups" on HN or in mainstream media. When is a company no longer a "startup"?
I know it's been addressed before, and there is no shortage of answers around [0]. But I can't help but think that, given my intuitive understanding, companies such as Atlassian are no longer startups.
[0] - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=when+is+a+company+no+longer+a+star...
The other comments addressed the first part (scalable business centered on growth), but the second part is a bit more nebulous. pg gave an off the cuff answer at YC's Work For a Startup day which was pretty insightful: "When politics starts working."
Of course, lots of people outside this definition call their small businesses "startups",esp tech people, and it feels like this is because they want to be part of the startup community. This seems good to me, so I think we shouldn't be too tight with our definitions.
http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...
In this sense, a typical new restaurant or dry cleaner isn't a startup, because they're following an established business model. A startup restaurant would be experimenting with innovative pricing, production, or other techniques, and would probably have to tweak its model on the road to success and would face an outsized risk of failure.
Personally I like Steve Blank's definition: "a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model" - which would suggest that once you've found (and proven) your repeatable, scalable business model you stop being a startup. I wouldn't hold a company to that definition if they thought otherwise though.