Existing Declining: A company that is 12 months or older with even or decreasing sales.

Existing Healthy: A company that is 12 months or older with even or increasing sales.

Nascent (Pre-venture) Entrepreneur: those individuals who have taken one or more active steps to form a business.

According to the Kauffman Foundation (www.kauffman.org).

Brett Bringardner

founder

Libriloop.com

book recycling

- Must have a cool name that does not describe what your company does. Example: Jangl.
- Cannot have a business model or an interest in developing one. Example: Twitter.
- Must raise as much cash as its founders can find from VCs and institutional investors. Example: Ning.
- Must have a CEO who knows that leadership is dead and that it’s all about doing what the “community” wants. Example: Mahalo.
- Should have at least one founder who went to Stanford. Example: Meembo.
- Must throw at least one huge launch party for a new product. Example: Netvibes.
- Must allow pets in the office. Example: Dogster.

Conversely, a startup cannot:

- Have a CEO over the age of 40. Example: Federated Media.
- Be based outside of Silicon Valley. Example: Wetpaint.
- Offer services that aren’t supported by advertising and that people actually pay for. Example: ConceptShare.
- Be profitable. Example: PlentyOfFish.

This is a definitive answer. Please close comments for this post.

I can’t close comments though – my editor won’t allow it – I checked.

I like the I-know-it-when-I-see-it defintion. :)

Speaking of interesting startups…I had a great talk today with Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga Game Network.

Check it out:
http://www.techconfidential.com/behind-the-money/blog/angel-investor/qa-with-zynga-game-network-fou.php

Looking forward to seeing you F2F at Alan Brody’s ibreakfast Web 2.0 event on the 31st!

All the best,
Mary Kathleen Flynn
Senior Editor
The Deal & Tech Confidential
mflynn@thedeal.com

We’ve just started trading recently and are expanding rapidly, yet we have the cool office culture, great benefits, open forums for discussions, flexible working hours.

Props to anybody that guesses who we are. European based : )

My business is a startup, I run a 1 man web development shop but from April I will have been in business for a year and want to move the business on so I feel startup at that stage would harm the business.

So I will take a stabI think if any of the below is true, generally (though not absolutely) you are a startup.

The key question is how mature is the company towards its business plan. For example, Federated Media has presumably executed the full scope of its business plan, i.e. they are selling ads, which I presume, was their plan. Twitter on the other hand has not even figured out a revenue model. That is clearly a startup. This does not work in biotech, where companies go public way before they sell anything. But in the internet space I think the “where are you in your plan” rule is pretty good.