“Working at a startup is demanding. GitLab team members are often under a lot of pressure.”
Isn’t being a $7.5B publicly-traded company the definition of not a startup?
Isn’t being a $7.5B publicly-traded company the definition of not a startup?
However I feel that it’s important to accept reality and not attempt to redefine words.
A startup is literally defined as to “get something moving”, I would say at this point that gitlab is definitely in the realm of “in motion” and has a significant amount of inertia. It is not in the first stages of becoming a company, it is a relatively well-oiled, thought through and publicly traded company.
Obviously terms can be fuzzy, there may be no single event that defines gitlab as no longer being a startup and no particular point in time being the point of state alteration.
But gitlab as it exists today definitely does not meet my own personal and informal definition of startup, and I suspect that is true for many people.
Look at how many different hands this had to pass through before anything got done. I don't think I've seen any startup survive working like that.
Oh and nothing is done yet, 5 months later. It's still in the "design phase".
PG says a startup is any company who looks at growth as their primary measure. A business is any company who looks at the bottom line as their primary measure.
So it depends on the definition you wish to subscribe to. There isn't a universal consensus but in this sense many HNers would see GitLab as a startup despite being worth many Billions.
"growth" is taken as the opposite of "value". A "value" company is a company with a low P/E, and with the added assumption that P is low due to reasons which are likely to change in P's favor.
Thus the difference between "growth" and "value" is simply if you are looking at the numerator or the denominator. This has no bearing on "startup" vs. "not startup"
Intel is a startup by this definition.
I really have a negative emotional response to abusing language like this.
All companies focus on growth to some extent. A growth-focused company is, in my option, a completely separate thing from a startup.
Though startups are usually extremely growth focused.
They are also very much focused on growth, and there was a time not so long ago when they were as dominant as Google/Amazon.
I really don't see how the definition is helpful in distinguishing companies, nor on how it has anything to do with which companies will be market winners.
For another example, Twist Biosciences. Some truly amazing tech, in a market which will dominate the future. They traded for about $20-30 from 2018 to early 2020. Peaked around 180 (6x 30)in Jan 2021. Currently trading as 31.92.
Are they a startup?
Novy-Marx (http://rnm.simon.rochester.edu/) showed that top-line revenue growth (rather than bottom-line, the "primary measure" cited above) was the strongest predictor of share price appreciation. He may or may not have been right, but he was undoubtedly influential, in that his insight lead to the "management quality" factor in factor modeling. [The Other Side of Value: The Gross Profitability Premium, Journal of Financial Economics 108(1), 2013, 1-28. http://rnm.simon.rochester.edu/research/OSoV.pdf]
So I would say most CEOs are looking at top-line revenue growth as their key measure.
Which makes PG's distinction more of a polemic than a discriminant.