[justiceforsaas]

It's painfully obvious this article was written by an investor for several reasons:

1) They define "growth" as a stage that goes AFTER raising money. As a founder, growth (planning, executing) should come before you ask for a single dollar (unless you're something like a hardware startup that needs bigger upfront investment). I write about this topic extensively [1] and one of the main differences I found between successful vs. failed founders is whether or not they found viable acquisition channels from the moment they started. Also, in many cases, raising money (too fast) was associated with a bigger chance of failure.

2) They associate a "startup" with getting financing rounds. 0 mentions for bootstrapped founders. Last time I checked [2], a startup is "a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable economic model."

A better title for this article would be would be: "There are only 3 startup stages for funded startups requiring bigger upfront investment".

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company

[bartread]

> It's painfully obvious this article was written by an investor for several reasons

This seems a bit churlish as an observation. The first paragraph makes it clear the piece was written by an investor, or at least with an investor mindset: "When you meet startups and VCs these days, there’s usually a lot of verbiage spent on defining stage (pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-A, Early A, A, Late A, B, C…). As a venture eco-system, we continue to struggle with this."

I don't see why this is painful or worthy of criticism, at least not on this point.

[switch11]

Actually agree with the original comment

This is an ASSUMPTION that all startups are VC funded startups or the goal of building a company is to get VC funding

*

That shows a very VC centric viewpoint, as opposed to a more balanced viewpoint

2nd wrong assumption -> That you can break it into 3 stages

That everyone else is wrong, and you are somehow right

3rd wrong assumption -> Growth is a stage, as opposed to something that has to be there from Day 1 until forever basically. Even if building hardware or Enterprise. You have to have a growth strategy from Day 1

[blackoil]

Funding for growth is not limited to h/w. SaaS also have similar behaviour, for enterprise sales you burn ~a year of revenue as acquisition cost, so first few you can do as PoC, but beyond that you need sales team and runway which may require funding.

Lot of time you have a viral idea, but not very sure of revenue model. You'll have a choice of getting revenue model right first or take VC money get customers and then fix the revenue model.