Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s essays are invaluable if you want to be a part of the startup ecosystem. His latest, Startup = Growth, is required reading, and defines, once and for all, the difference between a “startup” and a “new business”:
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
[…] Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be research scientist: you’re not committing to solve any specific problem; you don’t know for sure which problems are soluble; but you’re committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don’t discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.
You should read the whole essay over here.
What’s important to remember is that this is one model – you don’t have to go the Y Combinator / venture capital route if you don’t want to. If there’s one thing I learned at XOXO, it’s that a lot of people are earning a living in a lot of ways: there’s many routes to covering your costs, living a sustainable life and doing what you love. Patrick McKenzie and Amy Hoy are worth paying attention to here – as is virtually every successful technology project on Kickstarter.
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