The CEO of Stripe reveals what it's really like running a $9.2B startup
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
If you were the head of a 9B$ "startup", would you really say you "made it" ?. No , you would probably do like Patrick and John and say it is "so hard everyday", and we never "made it" to better subscribe to the startup narrative.
In summary, there is no content in this article as it is usually the case whenever successful founders are interviewed.
And it's the first sentence no less.
I find the definition of startup: "A business in the early stages" very limited and not that useful. Lots of old school business folk and baby boomer use startup with this in mind.
Paul Graham's definition is one where the number one priority is growth. A business in contrast the number one priority is the bottom line.
Priorities are a good way to differentiate between companies because they're trade offs and are specific/measurable. Companies will make decisions that reveal their priorities even if they profess to adhering to other priorities.
If you’re selling water and expect to grow a lot, unless you’re selling water in a completely new way, are you really a startup?
So far your definition so far is limited to just precluding anything greater or equal in age to 9 years or anything above 2 Billion in revenue.
Typically what happens as companies scale is they switch priorities from being growth oriented to being a profit oriented one -- the reason being is not looking after bottom line is simply not sustainable.
Focusing on growth at the expense of profitability is sustainable for early stage companies as a someone will pay to see if the growth can be realized.
Small, less than 4 years of age, under 100 people, aspiring and trying to find its way. Could be VC backed eyeballs-oriented, or regular slower-growth company.
Stripe is nothing like that today.
A startup is a company that hasn't identified a profitable business model. Legally, the definition is further restricted to a company which hasn't begun revenue-generating activities.
It's okay to be a startup for a few months while you're getting everything together and launching. Once you've launched, if you're still a startup, that's an embarrassment--it means your product (or products) isn't generating sufficient revenue to be a real business.
That seems like an equally useless definition. The profitability of many business models, especially ones in tech and manufacturing, is dependent on their scale so there's a circular dependency. More importantly, the meaning of "identifying a profitable business" is itself unclear. If I open up a new coffee shop in town, is my business model selling beverages, selling coffee, or selling coffee to the ~20k people who walk through my main street location (I'm using a small business example for simplicity's sake)?
That's why I often hear the term "product-market fit" as a way to describe startups. A coffee shop's market is set based on location and the product is a combination of the coffee and atmosphere but the area might be too competitive or too low volume to be profitable. In my opinion, even a coffee shop can be considered a startup until it is in the black and a small business afterwards because there is little opportunity to grow.
> Legally, the definition is further restricted to a company which hasn't begun revenue-generating activities.
This is better but then what is "revenue generating" activities? Putting up a Stripe form? Sending out sales people? Doing some marketing? Several of my previous startups had early stage partnerships which paid out a decent amount of money in exploratory contracts before we pivoted to the final iteration of the product. We may have even been profitable for a short while but I'd find it hard to argue that we weren't a startup or that we were a small business/established corporation.
However I would never ever use "start-up" to describe myself, but rather only others.
Then, the term was extended to mean a company that had not yet identified a profitable business model but was (presumably) working toward it.
Now, it's whatever the tech bros want it to be so that they can tell women that they work for a startup.
"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth."
- Top 10 companies in 2018: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Tencent, Berkshire Hathaway, Alibaba, Facebook, JP Morgan Chase, Johnson and Johnson
- Top 10 companies in 2008: Exxon, PetroChina, GE, Gazprom, China Mobile, ICBC, Microsoft, AT&T, Royal Dutch Shell, Procter and Gamble
Maybe Microsoft is no longer a startup. But the others, startups for sure. They are qualitatively different from normal companies.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
But Amazon is kicking ass as always, undermining industry after industry. They're still managed with the same tenacity. And dont count out Alphabet, Facebook, etc.
Whether or not we like these companies, they're a different animal from the norm.
We need a new system of incentives for information dissemination.
Most of the links that make it to the HN frontpage have honest, valuable content and are not mere clickbait, even if they are published by a company seeking to directly monetize their content.
It's improved somewhat, but I was surprised to later find out it was an actual company trying to run a news site.