Week 1 ~ J. Miguel Delacruz

What is a startup?

At this point in time when the tech industry is seriously blooming, startups have been the hottest craze in the business world. With the success of now huge, billion-dollar companies such as Facebook, Uber, and Pandora, it’s no question why so many young minds are giving it their all to become the next Marc Zuckerberg. A quick look at the networking website Angel.co shows that there are over 27,000 startups in the Silicon Valley alone. However, as popular as they are, the question remains: what makes a startup, a startup?

You can ask many different people, and consequently receive many different responses, so it’s concludable that there isn’t just one answer to this question. An article on Forbes titled “What is a Start Up?” offers several definitions given by successful entrepreneurs and business people. Some define startups through parameters, such as size, age, or profitability. The article writes that a business can’t really be a startup if it’s passed a certain age mark, which could be mirrored by the size and profitability of that company. For example, at the five-year mark of a ‘startup’, it wouldn’t make sense to call it that anymore if it now has 200 employees as opposed to 8, and generating millions in revenue. In my opinion, a more abstract approach offers a more accurate definition, and so I find co-CEO of Warby Parker Neil Blumenthal’s description to be the one that really nails it: a start up is a company working to solve a problem where the solution is unclear, and success is not guaranteed. When using this definition, you’re able to see a common trait that mostly all startups have; that they are all looking to satisfy a need, that no one else has yet satisfied.

There are many businesses like this, but to take this to an even grander scale, we can look at an entire industry as a startup. For example, the emergence of South Korean pop-culture allowed for a complete make-over of the country. This new genre of entertainment takes western pop, but with a South Korean flavor that gives a new, fresh perspective for the global audience. ‘K-Pop’ has picked up so much, that the government controls many aspects of South Korea’s entertainment industry. We can look at K-pop as an industry that satisfied a global need, and in turn, re-branded an entire nation.

*perhaps this question is too out of the scope of this discussion, but just how ethical/healthy is it for a government to control the image of it’s people?

(a start up flow chart defining what it really takes to be(or not to be) a start up)

https://tagdabe.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/how-start-a-startup-infographic.png

Works cited/consulted:

1.     1. Robehmed, Natalie. "What Is A Startup?" Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 15 May 2015. Web. 25 Jan. 2017.

2.      2.Hong, Y. Euny. The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World through Pop Culture. New York: Picador, 2014. Print