| The old' fashioned is not creating anything "new", by definition. If it is delivering it in some way like Zappos delivers shoes, or Uber send cabs, it is another story. The "extreme" part usually conceives that you don't know if what you are doing is something people want. We know old fashioned bakeries is something people want. This can be seen on how much Eric Ries talk about "pivots". A bakery pivoting will not be an old' fashioned bakery. Again, the definition is loose. Eric Ries' mentor Steven Blank has a more precise definition[1] which removes these cases: a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. I don't think these definitions are made to replace one another, they are made to give different views of the same object. The same way an elephant is not a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan or rope[2]. Edit: Swombat recently argued[3] that the difference between a startup a and a lifestyle business is that a "lifestyle business" lacks vision. [1] http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#John_... [3] http://swombat.com/2011/10/19/startup-vision |