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I read a great definition the other day by Steve Blank:

"a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."

source: http://steveblank.com/2011/03/18/new-rules-for-the-new-bubbl...

I crashed a few lectures of his MBA class and the first one was totally devoted to this one sentence.

He didn't just throw it out there, he quizzed the students with intense questions for an hour about what they thought startups were, like they were in law school and had a prof obsessed with the Socratic Method. It was surprisingly hard to define what a startup was and dovetails with the themes floating around HN lately.

I've seen some of them posted on-line in the past. Do you know if Stanford still do that?

thx

That's interesting, so by that definition is Facebook still a startup?

I don't know. Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google are obviously creating lots of new products/initiatives where revenue and scalability of the business model are still a big question mark. Is Facebook's core business scalable? Dunno.

Related question: Can you have a startup within a non-startup?

Only really if you want to argue that Facebooks business model is unsustainable. They're in profit now (I think?) so I'm pretty happy to say they're no longer a startup.

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