Ask HN: How does one define a startup?
The best definition I&#x27;ve heard of a startup is a business that doesn&#x27;t know:<p><pre><code>  1. Who its customers are.
  2. What it&#x27;s selling.
  3. How to make money.
</code></pre>
Aside from being punchy in its absurdity, it also explains other good startup definitions, eg. the Lean Startup&#x27;s &quot;A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model&quot; or Paul Graham&#x27;s &quot;A startup is a business designed to grow really fast.&quot;  What is it searching for?  The answers to those 3 questions.  Why is it temporary?  Because it runs out of money if it can&#x27;t find the answers to these questions.  What happens when it finds them?  It grows really fast.<p>The other thing I like about this definition is that it emphasizes that startups are meant to fill a previously-undiscovered hole in the marketplace.  Is a McDonalds franchise a startup?  No - it knows exactly who its customers are, what it&#x27;s selling, and how to make money.  Is a niche e-commerce shop a startup?  No - it knows exactly who its customers are, what it&#x27;s selling, and how to make money.  Was Facebook a startup?  Yes - it was unclear what it was selling or how to make money when they started (they had a pretty good idea that their customers would be local advertisers, though).  Was YCombinator?  Yes - they knew who their customers were and how to make money, but hadn&#x27;t quite nailed down what they were selling.  Was VMWare?  Yes - they knew what they were selling and how to make money, but weren&#x27;t clear who their customers would be.  Are these 3 companies startups <i>now</i>?  No - they&#x27;ve found the answers to all 3 questions, and now have a scalable, repeatable business model.  Businesses like Stripe and AirBnB are also not startups anymore, but arguably Uber still is, because they haven&#x27;t yet figured out how to consistently make money.<p>And it makes clear what you should be doing when founding a startup (trying to find the answers to these 3 questions), why people choose not to found startups (if you don&#x27;t find these answers, you&#x27;ve wasted millions of dollars and years of your life), when a company graduates into a regular business (when they&#x27;ve found answers to these 3 questions), why startups grow so quickly (because they&#x27;re entering effectively virgin business territory, they can capture the whole market without resistance once they find a business model that works), why they often seem absurd to critics (because they are), and why the rewards are so high (because the risks are too).