30+ Entrepreneurs

Running a tech company that’s not a start-up

When I meet people at networking events, they sometimes ask:”Oh, so you’re in tech! What does your start-up do?” It’s a reasonable question but it makes me cringe every time. Not because I don’t want to explain what our company does. To the contrary, I love to talk about what I do. No, I cringe because I don’t think we are a start-up.

You see, because we build apps people sometimes assume that we are a bunch of young adults who find nothing more uplifting in life than spending our days and nights at a shared office, creating awesome new products for companies. That’s just not true (well, except the part about creating awesome products for companies). And if the question catches me at the end of a rough day, I’ll almost want to scream “No! No! We’re not hip kids who just finished school. No! We’re grown-ups trying to build a great business. We have families. We have mortgages and tuitions fees to pay. We run a business not a start-up”. Well, I don’t scream because to be fair, I think it’s possible that I send mixed signals to people. I mean , yes we have clients but we also build our own apps for companies to use.

We have clients and we also develop our own products in our lab. So that makes us half a start-up then. No … ?

The dynamic is different when you run a business and rely on clients for cashflow. Perhaps because of that, we doesn’t feel like a start-up. But when our lab team works on a project and we get it funded, we feel like … well … like a “bunch of young adults who find nothing more uplifting in life than spending our days and nights at a shared office, creating awesome new products for companies”.

Confusing, huh?