the.com/startup
a company sprinting toward profitability before its bank account flatlines.
means A young company, usually in tech, built to grow fast and find a scalable business model — often burning investor money while racing to become self-sustaining.
from A plain compound of "start" + "up," both old Germanic-rooted English words. "Startup" first meant the act of starting something up — a machine, an engine — before it settled, in mid-20th-century American business slang, onto a newly launched company. The venture-capital sense we use today bloomed alongside Silicon Valley in the late 20th century, when "a startup" came to mean not just any new firm but specifically the lean, fast-growing, high-risk kind.
- survival rate
- about 90 percent eventually fail
- word origin
- used since 1550s, tech sense from 1976
- runway
- months of cash left before death
- unicorn club
- billion-dollar valuation, once vanishingly rare
- garage myth
- HP, Apple, Amazon all claim garage roots
airbnb — founded 2008, grew from $0 to $100b+ valuation by disrupting hotel industry
uber — founded 2009 in san francisco, valued at $80b+ while revolutionizing taxi/transport
stripe — founded 2010 by irish brothers, now valued at $95b+ processing billions in payments
openai — founded 2015, created chatgpt reaching 100m users faster than any app in history