Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how "start-up" has somehow become synonymous with software or web start-up company, but I think it applies to all start-ups in the sense that competency in the skills needed to create the core business are primary when starting out.

View on HN

Only on HN is startup synonymous with software startup. In other place startup can apply to many different kinds of firms: biotech, cleantech, nanotech, MEMS, semiconductor, medical device, to name a few technologies/markets that get much less attention on HN.

This site was Startup News when I registered. It was about software startups. Most every person who registered found this by googling for PG's name from lisp books, slashdot, and ycombinator. When the discussion became about web startup and business advice from blogs, pg increased the scope.

Nowadays, such articles about web startups are actually much rarer and do appeal to many users.

I have no problem with Hacker News' focus. It's useful because it's narrower than "all startups."

As a word, "startup" has it's origins in VC. In the last decades VCs focused primarily on software/IT. Because the industry was growing the most the fastest. Normal stuff. In a decade or so the conversation goes like "What do you do?" "Startup" "Oh, biomedical or..."

Those will all be software oriented as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com