I read this and listened to the NPR podcast episode this morning, and just wanted to say: Patrick and John, you guys have done a great job with Stripe and have made starting an online business simple. I don't think I would have started the businesses I have if it weren't for Stripe making payments so simple. (I saw that you mentioned the negative emails that you get every morning, so if you're reading this, here's a positive message.)
One must love the selection bias of all those articles about startups.
If you were the head of a 9B$ "startup", would you really say you "made it" ?. No , you would probably do like Patrick and John and say it is "so hard everyday", and we never "made it" to better subscribe to the startup narrative.
In summary, there is no content in this article as it is usually the case whenever successful founders are interviewed.
I get the difficulty component but surely acknowledging the luck component cannot be the scorn magnet? What is so bad about acknowledging that there was a component in the success (how ever small you want to make it) that wasnt truly you but just kismet?
No discussion at all of the actual content of what he was saying. In my experience he was right on the money. Problems just keep coming at you and you gotta deal. The only way to truly be successful and be able to look back and relax is to leave the business. Seems most founders aren't built that way though.
I tend to agree, though I doubt there's anything specific to unicorn success levels about that. Even the smallest business I ever started, with positive but very modest results financially, felt like that. I think it's probably the sense of building something completely new and open-ended that attracts a lot of us in the first place, and that drive doesn't disappear just because you finished your MVP or shipped v1 or hit this or that financial milestone.
> Patrick Collison, 29, and his brother John, 27, famously turned seven lines of code into a startup called Stripe, which has been valued in fundraising at $9.2 billion.
Depends on the definition of startup and what definition is most meaningful to the user.
I find the definition of startup: "A business in the early stages" very limited and not that useful. Lots of old school business folk and baby boomer use startup with this in mind.
Paul Graham's definition is one where the number one priority is growth. A business in contrast the number one priority is the bottom line.
Priorities are a good way to differentiate between companies because they're trade offs and are specific/measurable. Companies will make decisions that reveal their priorities even if they profess to adhering to other priorities.
PG definition is a shitty definition. Many public and private businesses you ask will tell you their number one priority is growth. Startup by the literal name being used means a relatively new company. If you want to differentiate among the general public use "tech startup" instead.
Agreed. If your company is 9 years old and making billions in revenue, it's not a startup. If it's still very growth-oriented, call it a growth-oriented corporation.
I think it's dependent on how much profit you're actually making. Revenue is irrelevant if you're in the red, as "start-ups" often are. That's what "growth oriented" means, imo. As companies mature certain other tasks are weighed more heavily, and in the grand scheme of things, if you're a mature company, growth isn't the number one priority. Rather maintaining your marketshare, and preventing other startups from taking your share of the pie takes up more resources than actual growth.
However I would never ever use "start-up" to describe myself, but rather only others.
People seem quick to provide criticism of definitions without presenting their own definition for reciprocated criticism.
So far your definition so far is limited to just precluding anything greater or equal in age to 9 years or anything above 2 Billion in revenue.
Typically what happens as companies scale is they switch priorities from being growth oriented to being a profit oriented one -- the reason being is not looking after bottom line is simply not sustainable.
Focusing on growth at the expense of profitability is sustainable for early stage companies as a someone will pay to see if the growth can be realized.
>People seem quick to provide criticism of definitions without presenting their own definition for reciprocated criticism. So far your definition so far is limited to just precluding anything greater or equal in age to 9 years or anything above 2 Billion in revenue.
Small, less than 4 years of age, under 100 people, aspiring and trying to find its way. Could be VC backed eyeballs-oriented, or regular slower-growth company.
PG's definition is but one bastardization of the word "startup" and it is by far the most useless one.
A startup is a company that hasn't identified a profitable business model. Legally, the definition is further restricted to a company which hasn't begun revenue-generating activities.
It's okay to be a startup for a few months while you're getting everything together and launching. Once you've launched, if you're still a startup, that's an embarrassment--it means your product (or products) isn't generating sufficient revenue to be a real business.
> A startup is a company that hasn't identified a profitable business model.
That seems like an equally useless definition. The profitability of many business models, especially ones in tech and manufacturing, is dependent on their scale so there's a circular dependency. More importantly, the meaning of "identifying a profitable business" is itself unclear. If I open up a new coffee shop in town, is my business model selling beverages, selling coffee, or selling coffee to the ~20k people who walk through my main street location (I'm using a small business example for simplicity's sake)?
That's why I often hear the term "product-market fit" as a way to describe startups. A coffee shop's market is set based on location and the product is a combination of the coffee and atmosphere but the area might be too competitive or too low volume to be profitable. In my opinion, even a coffee shop can be considered a startup until it is in the black and a small business afterwards because there is little opportunity to grow.
> Legally, the definition is further restricted to a company which hasn't begun revenue-generating activities.
This is better but then what is "revenue generating" activities? Putting up a Stripe form? Sending out sales people? Doing some marketing? Several of my previous startups had early stage partnerships which paid out a decent amount of money in exploratory contracts before we pivoted to the final iteration of the product. We may have even been profitable for a short while but I'd find it hard to argue that we weren't a startup or that we were a small business/established corporation.
There are three subcategories of innovation: product, process, and financial innovation. So you could be a water startup if your water is not differentiated but you have either some new way of financing the production of water or some new process for producing said water.
"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."
This is ridiculous, Microsoft and Apple who's founders are retired and dead are still startups? Startup is not just a synonym for tech company, it implies a certain lifecycle stage (among other things).
Certainly Apple is a wobbler (and Microsoft is questionable).
But Amazon is kicking ass as always, undermining industry after industry. They're still managed with the same tenacity. And dont count out Alphabet, Facebook, etc.
Whether or not we like these companies, they're a different animal from the norm.
Yes, they're a different animal from the past, but they are the new norm as software becomes a primary competitive advantage in all industries. We don't need to subvert the idea of startup to describe this: tech company does just fine. A startup is something that's starting, it's right there in the title, it completely neuters the word of all meaning to apply it to decades-old multi-billion dollar companies.
Both in terms of content and technology of the site, I've been consistently disappointed with Business Insider. Given its large reach, I consider it one of the worst outlets on the internet. Do others share this opinion?
A few years back when it was just starting up, Business Insider articles used to show up in my Google News feed all the time. From the quality of the articles, I thought it was one of those scammy overseas news sites that paid people with minimal English skills to "paraphrase" articles copied from a legitimate news site.
It's improved somewhat, but I was surprised to later find out it was an actual company trying to run a news site.
I am Print+Digital subscriber of NYTimes and I consistently get reminders to disable ad-blocker on desktop site and consistently get terrible ads on their Android app.
Can we agree that there are degrees of terribleness?
Most of the links that make it to the HN frontpage have honest, valuable content and are not mere clickbait, even if they are published by a company seeking to directly monetize their content.
