[eaurouge]

Nonsense! To start with, "startups are about growth" is Paul Graham's thesis, and it's just one way to define a startup. There are others; see jt2190's comment for a reference to Steve Blank's: "A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." I'm sure there are others.

There was a Silicon Valley decades before Internet/Web 2.0/somolo startups started colonizing San Francisco, and back then, there were startups in other non-Internet industries - heck there still are. There are startups in biotech, medical devices etc, that take several years just to develop a commercially viable product. Those startups don't use metrics like "5% week over week". They are, however, scalable businesses that may eventually justify VC investment.

There are lots of reasons to want to grow a business quickly, but a business doesn't automatically cease to be a startup because you have decided you don't "need to build it up fast", whatever that means.

Bootstrapped businesses can be startups, obviously. The cost of starting almost any business has fallen sharply in the past few years. You don't need VC funding to build a startup, fast or slow, unless you're building a capital intensive business or you can't fund your startup otherwise.