Written regarding Mark Suster’s rebuttal to Paul Graham’s essay about startups and growth.
I agree that the question is better asked “who should be raising VC funding?” vs. “what companies are startups?” What do you get by defining what a startup is? I don’t know.
But if you’re gonna be VC funded you need growth otherwise they’ll eat you alive. PG acknowledges this, so does Suster. That much is clear.
PG also admits that there are many companies that do not grow fast enough and take time to percolate that are worth pursuing. They just tend to be different kinds of companies, still worth pursuing, just different. In the second footnote of his essay, PG says:
One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to start businesses to use a restaurant as a model. What he meant, I believe, is that it’s fine to start software companies constrained in (a) in the same way a restaurant is constrained in (b). I agree. Most people should not try to start startups.
What PG is saying that YC will almost only fund companies that will grow fast, this is a reasonable investment model for them, shouldn’t keep you from building your company and building it without YC.
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