When Does a Startup Stop Being a Start-Up?
Either when it fails or succeeds is the most probable short answer.
Let’s face it, working for a startup or even better founding a startup is in vogue. It’s probably the coolest thing you can do sans not working at all. Just paraphrasing our contemporary culture.
A startup is a high-risk, unproven venture; a business that is being started up. Once it’s proven it’s no longer a startup but a company. Not a terrible advanced philosophical axiom. Yet, I hear folks still referring to their company as a *startup* despite the fact that it has succeeded, i.e. being profitable or being bought.
Startup has become synonymous with small privately funded companies (either revenue or head-counts) or certain industries (technology). Most likely due to our desire to associate ourselves with perceived than real success. It’s mostly corporate peeps that insist on calling anything younger than 10 years and with less then 500 employees a startup. Ri-dic-ul-ous.
I’ve worked on three startups over the past four years: one that never became a startup (stealth), one that failed and is no longer, and one that succeeded and which is no longer a startup but a very successful $50MM company.
The point being that startup is the short period from idea to either proven success or failure. This can be months or years (Plaxo, Rapleaf, Pandora et cetera) pending length of run-way. But for most startups it’s no more than 12 months in today’s world. If you don’t deliver during that time period the likelihood of a continuation is slim.
