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by jacquesm 4857 days ago
There is a huge difference between a life-style business and a start-up. Though the one could grow into the other the chances of that happening are fairly remote.

Most life-style businesses have built in limits to scale, most start-ups consider not scaling up and out a failure of sorts. As soon as compound growth is involved you're out of lifestyle business levels.

A typical life-style business is < 5 people, is in business-to-business, has a limited number of customers and does not aim to change that.

A typical start-up is one that is started by < 5 people, aims to achieve significant growth and is basically never going to be satisfied with the amount of reach they've got.

Start-ups will take outside investors, life-style businesses will not.
1 comments
pyalot2 4857 days ago
That's one of several definitions of a startup, and it's not the only one, or even an accurate one.

- There are any number of companies that started without outside investors.

- There are any number of startups that take outside investment but never scale.

- There are lifestyle businesses that turned out to scale at some point or another.

- To interpret compounding only in terms of taking investment and throwing away your life is a very narrow minded point of view.

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jacquesm 4857 days ago
That's the HN general use of the word start-up as per PG's definition. I agree there are others but it helps if we all use the terms the same way.

See here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4556838

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pyalot2 4857 days ago
Sure, I don't disagree with Startup == Growth. I disagree that it means anything but (such as outside investment, winning the startup/facebook lottery, compounding, putting insane life crushing hours, etc.)

There's a reason PG formulated it thus simply. It would be odd if for instance in the case of Viaweb (a startup without outside funding) PG would disqualify himself from having done a startup, but then went on to define startups...

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paul_f 4857 days ago
If we're gonna go there, lifestyle businesses solve real customer needs, usually for other businesses. Startups collect lyrics for hip-hop music. :-)
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