The journey to discover the true meaning of a Startup

“A startup is a company designed to scale very quickly” — Paul Graham, YCombinator

The word startup is one of the most used words in the technology world right now. Everyone in the technology field is talking about startups.

The big question

Do you know what a startup means? Do people know what a startup means? Is there a definition of what a startup means and when do you know that a company is no longer a startup? Or when a company can be categorized as a startup?

A Wikipedia definition of the startup: “A startup company (startup or start-up) is an entrepreneurial venture typically describing newly emerged, fast-growing business”.

So far we know that a startup means a new company, which tries to solve a problem that no one tries to solve it, or it tries to solve a problem in a different, unique way.

Searching for an answer

I was very interested in this startup word, started to read/watch/listen to things startup related and I didn’t understand what a startup means, I mean I knew that it’s a new company that tries to solve a problem but the big question for me was when I know that a company it’s no longer a startup? I’ve started to go deeper and read more articles about how this startup word began spreading in the technology/business field. I started to ask people that activate in the startup world, and every time I’ve got a different answer. Of course, each people has it’s own thinking about startups, it’s own thoughts on what a startup meant but for sure I was not yet 100% enlightened about it.

For most of the startup founders/employees, they like to think that they are a startup for the rest of their company life. But in my opinion a company, it stops being a startup when it starts to make money, real money and a new investment round is no longer in discussion. For sure the startup culture can be maintained, but you can not say that they are still a startup as the true meaning.

3 things

There are three things that are key ingredients of a startup:

• An idea. Even if startups are small companies, their ideas should be disruptive. They are either new products or services or innovative ways of solving a problem. To come up with a big idea, it can be hard or easy. The most advice that startup entrepreneur usually gives you is to ask yourself, “What are your problems? Can you find a way to solve them?” And then address that problem to a wider audience. You might just be on to the next big thing that’ll disrupt the market!
• A team. For a startup to be successful you need a team. And by team I mean a team of people that are determined to break their limits, people that believe in your idea and that will make everything possible to help the startup.
  As a little story related to this paragraph is the one about Airbnb hiring process in the first years of the company. Brian Chesky, one of the founders of Airbnb, used to ask at the interviews process the following question: “If you knew that you have only one year to live, will you still want to work at Airbnb?
  Yes, this is a crazy question, but this kind of commitment you need from your team.
• Scalability and growth. A startup need to have a scalable business model and the ability to grow rapidly with limited investment. You need to be focused at the beginning on growing, you need to set some metrics that you want to grow and focus on making it happen. At YCombinator, in the three months of the incubation, they ask you to set a metric, no matter what metric, and focus on scaling and growing it as crazy.

I also want to refer a little to this recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg at YCombinator new series: How to Build the Future where he is saying that he doesn’t understand why the process of starting a company nowadays is backwards. People are thinking to start a startup before knowing what company, what idea they should start. Why is this wrong? Because you need to work on something that motivates you, that gives you strength to break the tiredness and un-successes phases of the process. A startup is not something that makes just money, like a bakery or a restaurant. A startup is a company that makes a difference on a market, in the world.

Conclusions

A few things are i know certainly about startups:

- a bar/franchise/coffee shop is not a startup
- you need to solve a problem that people have in a way that no one tries to solve it
- You need to be used with chaos. A term that it’s describing the startup atmosphere
- you can fail at any point in time in a startup
- your idea’s not big until you prove it
- growth it’s your unity to measure the
- money are your stamina, and they are consuming quickly that you can imagine

If you have any thoughts please leave them in the comments. Also don’t forget to ❤ and share if you liked it.