A serious point underlies the flippancy in Single- vs Co-Founder: It’s Like Star Wars - we use the word ‘startup’ to refer to a wide range of different businesses, yet treat them as if they were basically the same thing. Advice for one doesn’t necessarily apply to the other, so we should ask: what do we mean when we talk about a startup?

Not so long ago, the definition of a startup was very literal:

A company that is in the first stage of its operations

During the dot-com booms, easily-accessible VC funding made the term virtually synonymous with the Silicon Valley, high-investment model. Until recently I’d always heard of it in this context, but I’ve never seen it clearly defined in these terms. Today there are a wide range of businesses with completely different operating models being referred to as startups; just take a look at these:

1. Bingo Card Creator - Patrick is the poster-boy for single-founder, organically-grown freedom-based software businesses. He started BCC as a side-project and has grown it to a small business empire that he runs as sole founder and owner. It’s not clear how it could have benefitted from VC funding or a co-founder. Is BCC a startup?
2. DuckDuckGo - Gabriel Weinberg is himself an angel investor, so does the plucky alternative search engine count as having taken investment already? As far as I’m aware, Gabriel works on DDG alone, but I suspect he wouldn’t rule out taking VC funding should its growth explode. Is DDG a startup?
3. Apple - Woz and Jobs didn’t take any external pre-IPO funding, yet their garage-born disruptive technology business is one of the classic startup stories. Would Apple be a startup in today’s terms?
4. Google - The archetypical Silicon Valley story. Two people with great ideas and technology. $100k angel investment before they even incorporated. $25m from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. $1.67b IPO. Most famous startup of our time.

How can we talk about what a ‘startup’ needs without differentiating between these kinds of companies? Should we talk about ‘funded startups’ and ‘organic startups’? Are there two (or more) discrete categories, or just points along a continuum?

Clearly we can imagine a continuum along the scale of funding / growth. Personally, I suspect profitability is greatest at the ends with a big dip of death in the middle. Have you ever heard of a company who said:

Now we’ve secured our series A round we’re planning to grow a bit faster than we can afford to, but not exponentially. Just somewhere in the middle.

Maybe I’m wrong and there are successful strategies like this, but it’s non-obvious. If there are discrete categories, what defines them?

• Growth vs. Revenue - are they using external funding to grow faster than their natural rate?
• Potential for Disruption - are they trying to redefine a market, or just find a profitable niche?
• Exit Strategy - IPO or profitability with dividends?

It’s interesting to see how historical cases are divided by these classifications; as a startup or whichever kind it’s clearly going to be more helpful to follow the example of companies who match your profile, but which are the classifications that count?

I don’t have any answers, I just have questions for you and everyone else in the community:

1. What sort of company do you mean when you say ‘startup’?
2. Is there a continuous scale between Bingo Card Creator and Google, or are they discrete types of startup?
3. How would you classify startups into groups, such that advice for one startup is likely to apply to others in its group? Is this even possible?

Answering these, even just trying to, will make future discussions more transparent and better-defined. How do you define and categorize startups?