My thoughts on why I will not call my business a startup again

We may very well see the slow fade of the word 'startup' as we know it.

The historical tendency seems to be towards consolidation. The web has been a beautiful chaos for us, but we are already seeing the changes. To name two, SOPA seeks to more rigidly defend intellectual property rights; Google has started charging for excess use of its maps. In other words...people are looking to make money.

And that is reasonable.

The low hanging fruit of the internet will disappear shortly. Like the land rushes of the railroad era, where pamphlets proclaiming the glories of midwest farming were distributed all around the world, it is important to remember those pamphlets were printed by the railroad companies themselves.

Are you speculating? Claiming 160 acres of land in Nebraska in the hopes the town booms? Or are you selling train tickets leaving New York?

At the end of the day your ultimate goal is to make money, that's all. I like the change you're suggesting. We're really just riding out the cultural wave that started when all the "dot coms" were startups, and so all tech companies under the meme of "two guys one VC" became "startups."

Historically you wouldn't be a startup if you bought three ships and sailed around the map to collect spices from India, but we might consider Christopher to have been a startup which collected VC funds from Spain before three ships came sailing.

We call them startups because our clan (two guys one VC) inherited the name from the businesses before us (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft). If you want to go and change the name you will have resistance, because that's what the name for our culture is. We're filled with names that don't truthfully reflect who we are, for instance, American is often thought of as the nationality of people from the USA, but that's silly because the Americas contain many more nations. Why aren't Mexicans considered Americans, yet Germans are considered Europeans? Everyone understands that Americans are from the USA, and Europeans are from Europe.

Everyone understands that tech companies are from the land of two guys who are trying to start a business with some funding. I like the idea of changing the name to something with great synergy for a new cloud-based webospher3.0 on the extranet, but to be totally honest it's simple re-branding of something most people involved with startups and VC understand. If your company is stuck starting up, I have a hard time believing it's simply because you called yourselves a startup. Many "businesses" are also in the same "startup" phase, and it's not because they call themselves businesses. I like the re-branding only because the name "startup" is a silly name, just like I wish we didn't call people from the USA a word that represents the population of two continents.

If VC money is involved and all that happens is a regularly profitable business, then is not really different from total failure.

To not be a failure you business must be a HUGE success, grow and profit like only startups like Google and Facebook have.

> Why aren't Mexicans considered Americans, yet Germans are considered Europeans?

I think you know this, but that's just a quirk of the language, that there's no euphonious way to say "United Statesan" since "States" isn't really a proper noun as a place name. "American" is a least-bad option.

Also, there could be other "United States" entities in the world. The USA isn't the only example of that construct. The demonym for a resident of the Federated States of Micronesia is "Micronesian".

Besides, "American" would be a bit too broad in applying to two whole continents. Nobody lumps Germans and Japanese together under "Eurasians". A Mexican is a "North American", which along with "South American" is a perfectly serviceable term and carries just about the same amount of specificity and meaning as "European".

Yes, naming is important, but it's also important to go along with established convention for meaningful communication. "Startup" conveys the potential of shoot-to-the-moon growth and profit that isn't possible in an established large company, and your listeners will lose some of that connotation if you switch to simply "business".

I enjoyed the article, never liked the term startup vs business, and nothing (not even hn) can really prepare you for what to expect when you actually go for it and start one.

But it's not a game. When people's businesses (even startups) fail, there's real harm done, maybe harm that will take years to repair. I guess when it's OPM who cares... but that attitude can be a precursor to irresponsible spending/investment and there seems to be a bit of that going around these days.