[sabat]

Maybe it's a New York vs. San Francisco thing, but in New York we're building companies, not startups

It's not a Bay Area thing -- unwarranted extrapolation. :-)

The problem seems industry-wide: I hear people (from all over the place) say "hey, look at my startup!" and point to a small Django app with no business plan or even a business concept, one "founder", and no indication whether that founder intends to stick with it and develop into a company.

Projects are not startups. A startup is, as Steve Blank says, a (small) organization that intends to develop itself into a company. A Rails app is not automatically a "startup".