You can have a rapidly growing company with an old business model. Look at McDonald's, for example. The business model, selling hamburgers, wasn't particularly different. But they took great advantage of the rise of car culture and TV advertising. Or look at the Android phone market. Selling phones is a pretty well understood business model, but companies there have grown rapidly by continual incremental improvement.

To demonstrate that Steve Blanks definition is materially different from Paul Graham's, perhaps you could name a few successful startups which found a scalable/repeatable business model, but that were not designed to grow fast?

All successful startups grow fast, because that's how we define business success. Not all fast-growing companies are startups, though.

EDIT: Most ecommerce startups would fall into your "proven business model" category, and yet they, like McDonalds before them, do extensive experimentation to find the path to rapid growth. Which is why Steve Blank underscores that the search is never finished.

If a company was formed to search for a scalable, repeatable business model, then he's still interested in it when they have found it. Then they're in the growth stage.

But if a company was formed, as most companies are, intending to use a proven business model, then it's not in his definition of a startup. No matter how fast it grows.

This would seem to exclude virtually all delivery service, cleaning service, car service, etc. companies, which are usually considered the prototypical SV startups.

If you were to start a Postmates competitor today, though, and were just doing what they did, then it wouldn't be a startup. At $250m ARR, their business model is already proven.

That's what "a company designed to grow fast" is.

>You can have a rapidly growing company with an old business model. Look at McDonald's"

McDonalds was a startup under this definition. If Ray's original plan was to take an old business model, redesign it for cars, and scale it rapidly with TV advertising, that's a startup by Steve and Paul's definition.

No. Most startups are designed to grow fast. But many non-startups are designed to grow fast. There is overlap in the Venn diagram, but they are not the same thing.

> If Ray's original plan

If that was Kroc's plan, you'd be right. Do you have some evidence it was?

As far as I can tell, he spotted an existing restaurant that had already found product-market fit and just scaled the operation using variants on known franchising approaches. I also haven't seen any evidence that at the time he foresaw suburbanization, white flight, and the resulting increase in value of heavy branding, trends that were nascent at the time he joined McDonalds.

I'd say it was more akin to the top-growing restaurants of today, ones I point out elsewhere in this discussion. They are fast growers, but they are scaling mild variations on well-known business models.

To this day this is a major selling point. When travelling you can take your chances on a local place or go with what you know.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/start-up

"A Fledgling Business Enterprise"

That's exactly what it means, no more, no less. Keep in mind that outside of the HN crowd absolutely nobody would know who either Steve Blank of Paul Graham are and neither of them get to redefine the English language.

Did I say that somewhere or are you just straw manning me?

My post and paulsutter's are clearly referring to the Silicon Valley idea of a startup, not the general idea. The difference is one of intent, so it is useful to distinguish between the two.

Someone who opens a diner or a watch repair shop or a Kinko's franchise with the intent of servicing their locale is certainly doing "a fledgling business enterprise" and thus may technically be doing a startup. But SV is specifically interested in greenfield endeavors that can leverage the web or other new tech to find a large customer base and rapidly scale to billion dollar+ valuations.

Given your long history on HN I know you know this so why are we bickering over semantics?

It's true that lots of people use the word startup to mean fledgling business, and that's perfectly OK and cool, but if you use the term "startup", in Silicon Valley, to refer to a lifestyle business, people will view it as self-aggrandizement or delusion.

This is also true in any venture capital context anywhere in the world.