I dislike “Startups” in the UK
I’ve worked at some small companies as both employee and freelancer. I’ve also started my own business a number of times. In all these experiences, the company in question was never been termed a “startup”. It was always just “a business”.
To me, defining yourself as a startup is a mistake. It smacks of drinking the Silicon Valley Koolaid and the almost desperate business models that follow. On TechCrunch today there was a good example of this; the company described themselves as “a fast growing tech company with a deep product backlog, high growth on our core web and email offerings and an overwhelming desire to invest in our customer understanding and in our technology“. You know what I smell? BULLSHIT!
There is often bitching about how there isn’t a Valley culture anywhere in Europe, today I started to wonder if that isn’t such a bad thing. Perhaps there are just fewer rich idiots over here prepared to fund stupid ideas?
Calling yourself a “business” forces you to think about… BUSINESS! If you went around saying you ran a business, people would expect it to do something: to provide a service or product, but when you call yourself a Startup it’s like you have a license to ignore common sense.
In fact, I do now talk about one of my past businesses as a Startup: I spunked $50,000 up the wall on an unproven idea that crashed and burned with zero customers. Truly, a Startup ;-).