There are only three startup stages

In my experience, for an early startup, all this careful analysis goes out the window as soon as you have two or more VCs interested in your deal and competing with each other. At that point it becomes little more than an auction and you realize that it’s just gambling with post-facto justification. Nobody knows what they’re doing.

It's painfully obvious this article was written by an investor for several reasons:

1) They define "growth" as a stage that goes AFTER raising money. As a founder, growth (planning, executing) should come before you ask for a single dollar (unless you're something like a hardware startup that needs bigger upfront investment). I write about this topic extensively [1] and one of the main differences I found between successful vs. failed founders is whether or not they found viable acquisition channels from the moment they started. Also, in many cases, raising money (too fast) was associated with a bigger chance of failure.

2) They associate a "startup" with getting financing rounds. 0 mentions for bootstrapped founders. Last time I checked [2], a startup is "a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable economic model."

A better title for this article would be would be: "There are only 3 startup stages for funded startups requiring bigger upfront investment".

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company

It's convenient for a VC who only gets to touch several points of a founder's journey label it as having only 3 stages just to make their lives easier. Bucketing them into these limiting categories is a gross oversimplification. The different pre-A stages have come about to make it more accessible for founders to start companies.

YC started in such a capacity to give smaller checks to more people so that more founders can try something (the seed round). That has honestly democratized the whole game, and I think constricting the different stages to make it seem like there's some sort of golden standard is exactly the kind of old guard mentality preventing new founders from getting started even if just with a little bit of money.

There are 3 VC funded startup stages.

Note that "Sustainable" is not on this list because a VC would rather you go bankrupt than be a merely profitable business.

The funding rounds are not a good way to describe the embryology of a company. Different kinds of companies, like different species, develop in different ways.

Look at a company like si5 that's making hardware: it had several rounds before getting into revenue, each one reducing risk for new (and existing) investors.

When I worked in pharma I thought of company stages from a tech perspective. I once characterised them as "pre revenue -> pre profit -> profit". Our chief scientist asked, "what's pre profit?" In her experience you went from pre revenue either straight to profit or dead. No ramp up in the tech sense.

Even if you think of startups within these stages, no two startups is going to have the exact same journey. Each startup has an incredibly different experience and timeframe flowing from one transitory phase to another. This is why bridge rounds exist, and how companies like Slack come into existence after offering to return money to investors.

>I see myself and my work as being an “early venture investor.” I work to carefully and selectively build a concentrated portfolio of companies that are clearly “pre A” in terms of stage, but where I believe the likelihood of “getting to A” is high and where I will intend to work hard with each one of them in order to get there.

Why should one take investments from an investor with a portfolio that is limited to 'pre A'? Doesn't investor selection come down to finding a network that can give you access to early customers and industry experts? Where is that access when they hand over the successful companies to others?