Being “startup” just means you’re a business building something new or novel, it doesn’t mean you automatically have to follow the VC-model for startups.

if you start a bakery selling kimchi bagels, its not a startup

They're disrupting the bagel market, leveraging their unique vision. Think of them as a DoorDash for people who want to come into their bakery.

Wouldn't the key difference be the growth trajectory? I see a startup as a small business that aims to become a big one. Most small businesses are comfortable at their size, but a startup is not. It could achieve that growth by taking on lots of investment, but that's not the only way.

More money pretty much always helps with growth though. The argument is that they're hiring as fast as can be done (to maintain culture/quality/interview-pace) and they have nothing else they can spend money on. It's not impossible.. but it's a bit hard to imagine there is no way at all to increase your workforce productivity. But maybe they're all working 12 hours a day, making huge salaries and eating caviar while getting massages during their breaks

Maybe it does, but it's not the only way. Microsoft, famously, was bootstrapped.

"Linear raises $82M in series C funding at $1.25B valuation to challenge Atlassian"

interesting.. one wonders then why they raised funding if their income is covering all their expenses

unless they have some creative definition of profitable

Speed of growth.

Being profitable is one of the best times to raise. You don't need the money, but it'll accelerate the next phase of growth.

Retaining profitability after raising is probably harder as you're expected to spend that money to grow.

I'm sure it can be done if you've raised with the right people and you keep focus on ARR per FTE.

And if you raise after you’re already profitable, you have a lot more control / leverage over the terms and who is involved.

> Speed of growth

But the post we are discussing is literally about hiring slowly and only if really needed and only hiring the "next great engineer".

I understand that the post words are written deliberately in a way open to more interpretations, and the "only if needed" can apply to "we need to take on more Atlassian customers so we need this and that".

I think the point is there are many "startups" with similar revenue and growth to Linear that never become profitable. I don't think Linear qualifies as a small business and I don't think they're scaling less quickly than someone in same market with more funding and less profit.

To me a startup hasn't found a product-market fit yet. That's the whole point, they're trying to find a way to get profitable. As soon as you are profitable, then you are a normal company.

That definition, I never heard before. I think you're confusing yourself and others if you make up your own meaning of words.

A startup can be profitable.

Wikipedia's first line is: "A startup or start-up is a company or project typically undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model."

Then it has a notion of "growing large beyond the solo founder". But I argue that most of the time, this is just the story they tell to justify their losing money. As in: "we are not profitable YET, because we need to grow larger to reach the scale we need, hence you should give us more money".

> A startup can be profitable.

Is Logitech a startup? They (or at least not so long ago) call themselves a startup. I disagree: it's an established company.

If a company of 20 employees has been profitable for 10 years and doesn't grow, would you call it a startup? If it is profitable and keeps growing while staying profitable, wouldn't you say it's "expanding"?

Now if that company of 20 employees suddently gets a big funding to try to become a company of 2000 and goes into a state where it may well bankrupt in the next 2 years if it fails, then I would again consider it a startup: it's "trying a completely new business model" (one that works for 2000 employees instead of 20, probably with the goal of making the leadership rich).

Another thing is that startups usually tend to be those Ponzi schemes where employees are badly treated but get not-so-worthy stock options (that may compensate someday for the bad conditions, but often don't) while the founders get a shot at getting rich. If your company is profitable and stable, it's much harder to do: how would you justify the bad conditions if you could actually afford better ones?

But of course, saying that you are a startup is "cool", which is exactly why Logitech was saying it though they were one of the big tech companies in the world.