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Comment by ef4 | Hacker News Reader

> The concept of entrepreneurism as a small-time life-style has evaporated from the culture, and now entrepreneur and start-up means “get big fast.”

No. Get yourself out of the filter bubble, because it is seriously warping your understanding of the world.

There are still orders of magnitude more "small-time" start-up businesses in the world than "get big fast" start-up businesses. Your town probably has dozens of them: they're restaurants, roofing companies, independent tradesman, etc. Those people are all doing exactly what you're talking about.

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Those are called small businesses.

When you tell people you are doing a start-up it is deeply implied you're doing something with the hopes of hitting it big. Because if it wasn't you would just tell them you "run a roofing company" or are "an electrician" or "sell stationary on the internet"

A start-up, even to non-technicals, connotes an attempt to hit it big.

Exactly, start-up entails growth. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

You realise that's an opinion piece written by one person right? PG has a very specific angle on the start-up world.

I usually think it connotes some stupid social app.

The two are far from mutually exclusive.

It's interesting how nomenclature changes your perception of a business. It is acceptable for a tech startup, for example, to pursue try to increase adoption rate by giving away a service for free in the hopes of securing investment. It would not be nearly as acceptable for a restaurant to give away free food to get more diners in an effort to lure investors.

Despite that food actually costs money many restaurants do in fact give away a lot of food in hopes of gaining customers.

A slight distinction is that no restaurant would make it an ongoing policy to give away free food to every customer who walked in the door. Rather, restaurants will have a buy one get one free promo, or a free dessert with entree purchase to lure more paying customers.

I've worked for two tech companies doing fairly cutting-edge R&D that were definitely "start-ups" in every sense of the word, called themselves such, but were never developed with the intention of getting a bunch of VC money then making a big exit. These are much more common than you probably realize, even within the tech sector.

Getting really big then exiting basically necessitates that you have to be in a mass-market business. But do only mass-market businesses get to call themselves start-ups? Is there no place for start-ups in specialized fields with significant revenue potential but without the kind of universal applicability that makes VC's wet their pants?

Isn't cutting edge research a very pure version of trying to hit it big? Sure, there might be no VC involved. But what does that matter?

Isn't there something inbetween?

I'm currently developing SaaS for a certain service industry in Sweden.

I wouldn't say this is hitting it small, nor is it batting for the major leagues. It's a decent sized chunk of project that will build the skills and capital needed for our next level-up sometime in the future.

Look at the specific sentence I quoted to criticize.

Do you really agree that "The concept of entrepreneurism as a small-time life-style has evaporated from the culture"?

Careful. Your valid point is one KK is making too by recommending this book. He's just setting the stage by contrasting this approach with how 'start-up' has come to be associated with "get big fast" in our tech world.

Can you name some examples of successful startups which did not get big fast?

37Signals, &yet, ColourLovers; just to pick a few examples from those that might be familiar to HN readers.

The Googles and the Facebooks, the Yammers and the Zappos's are outliers in terms of scale. That's what makes them interesting.

The very point being made is that Don Lancaster describes how to be successful in business without having to get big fast. KK is merely pointing out how Don did this before entrepreneurism came to be associated with fast growth.

Your question and ef4's comment are caught in an attractor of a different debate.

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