Most startups fail.
You need to be good to succeed.
You need to be good to succeed.
> Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded.
Then they're probably not startups, but just tech businesses. Nothing wrong with that - they're objectively better in my opinion - but let's not call them something they're not just because we like the word or we want the cachet of being associated with something we're not.
Numbers-wise, I'd think VC-funded startups merit the distinction. They're (a) relying on financiers to make their strategy work (b) there's significant positive & negative impacts of that decision vs everyone else (c) they're the minority.
Startups using non-VC revenue are the majority and also doing all sorts of great work in invention+innovation in tech, business model, doing with scalable ideas, etc. VC $ buys things like press relationships and "X raised Y" headlines, but thankfully the days of breathless capital raise news on tech crunch are much more zzz now.
By your definition. And maybe a bunch of people who read the PG essay that narrowed the word that way. But not by the definition of 99.9% of economic participants.
Investopedia's definition, for example, bears no relationship to the PG definition. Neither does Webster's, dictionary.com's, or any entrepreneurship textbook you might find. Even Steve Blank doesn't define it that way.
It's always better to be getting money by selling to customers. It's amazing how well that works and how much less capital you need to grow.
Getting a big exit is my goal as a founder. Investor capital is spent to get to that exit. People who have the goal of making money off investors make self-enriching, bad for the company decisions.
On the other, I really worry that we now have a generation of entrepreneurs and employees who have only ever known a bubble environment. Many will have a hard time adapting to the actual reality of running functioning businesses.
You need to be good, somewhat lucky, and have product/market fit to succeed.
Product/market fit doesn't fall out of the sky either. It's created by being good.
Startups are explicitly disrupting the status quo. Yeah, one needs to be good enough to do that but it’s nothing to downplay. That is hard in a world of established actors.
Nonetheless, you're still attributing way too much to the ability of the leadership. After all, that story is so remarkable precisely because it's pretty much the only well known example of this.