start-up company

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Twitter cofounders Biz Stone (left) and Evan Williams, 2009.

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start-up company, a business at the initial stages of its life cycle. It is typically characterized by an innovative stance, a potential for rapid growth, external funding, and vulnerability. Start-ups can appear in virtually any industry and may span more than one, and they have given rise to the start-up culture, which values creative and innovative thinking. Many start-ups seek to establish a repeatable and scalable model that addresses a particular gap in an existing market or creates a new market entirely, and they are therefore often disruptive in challenging the conventional business model.

While the characteristics of start-ups have pervaded business ventures since the early days of commerce, the rise of the modern start-up is closely related to Silicon Valley, a region in California that became a home to many companies focused on the production of semiconductors and later on the research and development of computers and related products. As the use of computers in households proliferated, there was a surge in Internet-related start-up companies in the mid-1990s, an era that later became known as the dot-com bubble (1995–2000). Start-up companies such as Netscape Communications Corp. gained traction in this context. The dot-com bubble peaked in March 2000 and crashed from 2000 to 2002, as many of these companies lost funding and filed for bankruptcy while others, such aseBay and Amazon, survived.

Start-ups often face many challenges such as competition, the need to raise capital, and the risk of failure as well as hurdles stemming from legal work, accounting procedures, and attracting employees. Success is often hampered by inadequate marketing, a lack of expertise, poor partnership, and insufficient research, each of which compromises the survival of many firms. On the other hand, start-ups can offer opportunities for workers to gain greater responsibility, knowledge, an innovative mindset, and leadership skills while providing a flexible schedule and job satisfaction.

Start-ups often seek several sources and rounds of funding. The funding rounds of a start-up typically follow these steps: pre-seed, seed, followed by Series A, B, and C and, if necessary, D and E. Pre-seed funding is the earliest funding stage and typically stems from the owners themselves as well as from friends and family to fund development of a product. Seed funding is a start-up’s first official funding stage and typically comes from private investors—namely friends, relatives, or acquaintances, some of whom could be wealthier “angel investors” who receive profits from or an equity stake in the company. Funding for start-ups in the seed stage can also stem from self-funding (also known as bootstrapping); crowdfunding; microloans; start-up incubators, which support entrepreneurs from the ground up; and start-up accelerators, which support early-stage companies that already have a product that can attract customers.

If a start-up has a promising long-term outlook and an identified product after the seed funding stage, a start-up may move on to the next round of funding: Series A funding, which typically comes from venture capital, angel investors, and start-up accelerators. Those who invest at this stage often expect a substantial return on their investment. If successful, a start-up may undergo Series B and C funding rounds that can attract investment from hedge funds, private equity firms, or investment banks. A start-up may undertake Series D and E rounds of funding if additional funds are necessary. Similarly, some stages can be bypassed. The process may culminate in an initial public offering (IPO), whereby the company’s shares are sold on a stock exchange.

Entrepreneur Steve Blank distinguished between six different types of start-ups, based on their intrinsic nature: lifestyle, small business, scalable, buyable, social, and large company start-ups. Lifestyle start-ups are typically led by self-employed entrepreneurs who turn their personal passion into a business, while small businesses such as consultants, hairdressers, or travel agents generate income to support a family and are often funded by means of loans or savings. Scalable start-ups, exemplified by Silicon Valley firms such as Skype and Twitter (now X), are funded by venture capitalists and aspire to create equity, to expand, and to be eventually publicly traded or taken over. Buyable start-ups often rely on crowdfunding or on angel investors to grow but aspire to be bought, as exemplified by Divshot, which was taken over by Google in 2015. The ambition of social start-ups, on the other hand, is to tackle social issues by means of charitable initiatives such as donations. Large company start-ups are large companies that continue to innovate by offering new products or services initially at a smaller scale and expanding on them if successful.

Start-ups can also be classified according to market value. Start-ups that are valued at more than $1 billion are referred to as unicorns, a term coined by the prominent angel investor Aileen Lee in 2013 to highlight their statistical rarity. Decacorns are start-ups whose value exceeds $10 billion, while hectocorns are those valued at more than $100 billion, based on the Greek words deka (“ten”) and hekaton (“hundred”), respectively. In 2022 there were two hectocorns: the Chinese Internet technology company ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) and SpaceX, an American aerospace company.

Valuing a start-up, however, can be a challenging task. Start-ups often have little to no income and limited to no historical financial data, both of which are typically used for the valuation of established businesses. As a result, start-up valuation methods use slightly different approaches, which include cost-to-duplicate, discounted cash flow, and market multiple. The cost-to-duplicate approach determines the cost of duplicating the same company, while the discounted cash flow approach estimates the company’s value based on its expected future cash flows. The market multiple approach values the company against recent transactions or acquisitions similar to the company. The valuation of a start-up typically has more of an emphasis on qualitative elements as compared with the valuation of mature companies.

Leading countries for start-up formation have included the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Israel. Although Silicon Valley remains a major start-up hub, annual events such as Slush, held in Helsinki, attest to the global extent of the business venture.