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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:

   A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.

A friend of mine used:

   A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.

From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.

A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.

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Why should it grow to 100M in 5 years?

A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?

Nobody's saying that's bad. but it's not a startup. A "startup" is defined by growth. https://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Businesses that don't have the ambition to grow very quickly should not take venture capital. It's a waste of everyone's time and energy

You say this as if venture capital is lying there on the ground for anyone to pick up. What VC do you know that aren't investing in companies that want to grow very quickly (or in companies that they then force to grow quickly)?

Depends on the market size. If the market is 100M, then a 500k profit effectively means your product will be inferior and poorly placed to evolve. If the market is 500k, then by all means go ahead. Startup are designed with explicit purpose of designing a product to capture that market without having to worry about the revenue during the time the product is being made. But of course capture does mean capture quickly because of the first mover advantage.

> A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.

How can you assign a name to something based on what might happen in < 5 years ?

Whether the company targets or not that goal is a major distinction.

For example if I open a restaurant I'm 100% guaranteed not to be valued 100M in 5 years.

If I target to be the next social network and compete with TikTok, then it's a startup.

Goal, ability to scale, global business from the onset, etc. are things you can perceive today without being able to read the future.

To me a startup is something that's not yet profitable

so every government is a startup?

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