Startup = Growth

What defines a startup for me is utilizing technology with a very good chance it will be a spectacular failure. You have a great feeling that you'll have users but there's a very real chance that you'll get none to 10 and go down in tremendous flames. You're swinging for the fences. That's because you're doing something that no one has done or your entering a market with huge dominant players whom you hope to usurp. It's either very audacious or insane. Your 10 professional friends split down the middle when asked.

You know if you open a barber shop you will get people come in off the street to cut their hair. You just worry you'll have enough over time to sustain it. If you start a consulting business you know you'll get clients (at least I assume you do) as your skills are in demand. You probably got commitments from at least 3 before you made the plunge. It's just whether you'll get enough and a steady flow to go with. If you're bootstrapping a lifestyle tech company it's probably because you know exactly what the market needs and have your first 5 customers from your previous gig so you know you can get through the first year. All of these still have a large amount of risk but they're not really true startups to me.

It's true it's very hard to have a startup without (rapid) growth as the central tenant . And you can have many businesses that are not startups that aren't focused on growth over anything else. However, you can have many businesses that are not startups hyper focused on growth (SuperCuts, Pappa Johns) to make the definition in this essay too weak for me.

The other insight Bezos had about books was that the extent of the market was limited by a physical constraint in how big a store could get. It was a perfect product to exploit unmet demand for long tail titles. Groceries don't seem to suffer this problem to such a degree. Most of what people want to eat is available in local stores.

Hmmmm... I don't think just that PG's definition is a subset of Blank's.

Unless he's changed his tune in the latest book (The Startup Manual is still in my to read pile) then under his definition the company stops being a startup once you have achieved the "repeatable and scalable" bit. Then it's just "a company" :-)

For Blank Startup == being in Customer Discover/Validation phase. Once you're out of there and in Customer Creation & Company Building you're no longer "a startup" - you've found your business model and are busy applying the heck out of it.

Under pg's definition the bit that defines the startup is the "Customer Creation" stage when you've found your business model and and are growing fast (to quote "Together these three phases produce an S-curve. The phase whose growth defines the startup is the second one, the ascent.").

Under Blank's definition you've stopped being a startup at this point - you've found your scalable business model. Under pg's definition you would still be a "startup" in the Customer Creation & Company Building stages as long as you're growing and haven't hit internal/market boundaries that slow your growth.

Also PG's focus on fast growth doesn't seem to be present in Blank's work.

I'm think Blank would be happy to call the early days of a new retail organisation like Ulta Salon a "startup" (they found a new repeatable and scalable business model for retail, taking the beauty counters out of the larger stores and sticking 'em as stand alone stores on cheaper real estate).

I get the impression that their very impressive growth (for retail) of 92% since 2006 wouldn't count as "startup" under PG's definition... or maybe not.... I don't know.

I agree, and it's also a direction that I'm personally headed (currently focused on freelancing/bootstrapping), but I also think it has more to do with the current recession more than anything. It's a really tough environment now and I think a lot of the innovation over the next few years is actually going to come from the big tech companies.

Some of the best startup advice you'll ever get is by @yegg in "Paths to $5M for a startup founder": http://gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/paths-to-5m-for-a-st...

No one ever becomes a great entrepreneur overnight and it's a fallacy to think that you could do a high-growth startup only when you're young and in your 20s (Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Jim Clark, Mike Bloomberg all started their big companies in their 30s; Mark Cuban and Mark Pincus started their billion-dollar co's in their early 40s).

I think it's wise to maintain a very long-term view of the startup game, and to take bigger risks gradually as you develop into a stronger entrepreneur. So, I think it's smart to prove yourself as a bootstrapped entrepreneur and make your first few million and be financially independent, and then be in a position to take big risks to work on a high-growth startup.

Jim Clark, the greatest serial tech entrepreneur to date, started SGI when he was 37 and Netscape when he was 50. This is a long-term game.

From my experience selling services and products to large companies for the past 10 years, "interest" doesn't mean much. Everyone is interested. You don't have anything until you see the signature. And I don't mean the signature on the contract. I mean the signature on the check.

I agree with you that pg's point about startup growth is not invalidated by the realities of enterprise selling. But I think te way past those realities is to change the rules of the game. The "sale" should be a low-friction agreement to do business at some cost per unit/user/GB/etc. Growth is the. The ability of the product to go viral within the account. Essentially, it becomes the same process as a consumer sale with the one additional step of getting approved to sell into that batch of consumers.

While that might seem to be a big negative against starting an enterprise business, the advantage is that you're then convincing people to spend someone else's money which is easier than convincing them to spend their own. How else could a $.99 app look, feel, perform better than a $100,000 peice of enterprise software.