start-up -- n. a fledgling business enterprise
A new company with slow growth is a start-up. An old company with fast growth is not a start-up.
There's nothing about the growth rate that qualifies a company as a start-up. Though I suppose it could seem that due to a new company having "nowhere to go but up [or fail]".
If I open a hot dog stand, I may have incorporated only a month ago, but I haven't founded a startup.
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This reminds me of one of my favorite HN posts ever. It's about dictionaries, good and bad.
No. For that, you'll have to provide a narrative of how you will revolutionize the global fast food market and secure the fate of humanity by providing billions of people real-time access to the very best of bovine and porcine by-product nutrition (optional: include heart-warming story about Denise, a mother of 7 from Decatur, IL, who was enabled to escape a hell of drug abuse and prostitution by opening a franchise, highlighting the world changing nature f your business and elegantly glossing over the fact that the franchise owner effectively earns less than a toddler searching landfills for sources of lithium).
Allowed to fester, the spin-terrorists will rape a language to its death.
Hackernews is not the world.
That must be why this is a reoccurring discussion on HN...