What is a Start Up?
21st/22nd of November, The Hub attended THS Armada student fair at KTH. We brought with us a great energy, a dozen of hiring startups, loads of candy and as many stickers.
What we did not expect was that recurring question: What is a startup?
Lesson learnt. Raising awareness and educating newly or soon to be graduates about the wonderful world of startups is now on top of our priority list.
So, what is it really? Taken by surprise I stumble on my words trying to work out an elevator pitch: Innovative, disruptive, fast growing and for sure, very cool, were the first words that came to my mind.
In theory, the term Start-up, according to the holy wikipedia “is an entrepreneurial venture which is typically a newly emerged, fast-growing business that aims to meet a marketplace need by developing a viable business model around an innovative product, service, process or a platform.”
However, in practice, everyone seems to have their own version forged with personal experience:
Co CEO of Warby parker Neil Blumenthal says “A startup is a company working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is not guaranteed”.
Adora Cheung, cofounder and CEO of Homejoy, describes it as “when people join your company and are still making the explicit decision to forgo stability in exchange for the promise of tremendous growth and the excitement of making immediate impact.”
And Eric Ries, author of The lean startup to add: “A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty”.
So “uncertainty” and “unknown” are words that seem to come back a lot. But not just these words, those as well: “new”, “excitement”, “solving” and more importantly, “growth”.
Startup = Growth. Paul Graham, co founder of Y Combinator
In the end, the one I like the most is the definition of the actual verb to start-up: “the action or process of setting something in motion”.
It is an idea and following it through. Believing in your vision and surrounding yourself with people crazy enough to believe in it too. And together, build something new and exciting, take risks, work hard and learn a lot along the way, about a product, a niche, a market. About growth, in business and in life.
So, there you go young graduates. You who firmly said, “no thank you, I want to join the corporate world”, you who were unsure about the future, you again who got curious and asked to know more.
Whoever you are and whatever your aspirations for the future are, we are there for you, to guide you through the challenging yet magical world of entrepreneurship. We are setting things in motion, join us!
written by Morgane Oleron, Business Developer, thehub.se
The Hub is an open digital platform tailored to the needs of growth startups. We aim to give visibility to all Swedish startups and via the platform assist startups with the recruitment of talents, fundraising, best practices, useful tools, and also by listing all the relevant tech events out there. The Hub is in Sweden run bySUP46 and powered by Danske Bank.
