Why some startups don’t want to be called that – TechCrunch

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When does a startup cease being a startup? It’s a more durable query than it appears — tech corporations have discovered that there’s energy in phrases. Let’s discover! — Anna

Startup versus scaleup

“We’re not a startup, we’re a scaleup,” advertising govt Cristina Marcos advised me of her employer, interactive content material creation platform Genially. This was really one of many first issues she stated once we met in particular person earlier this week, and her emphasis actually caught my consideration.

On the one hand, it appears affordable to say that an organization like Genially, which has thousands and thousands of customers and raised greater than $26 million in funding, is not a startup. On the opposite, “startup” is such a buzzword that it’s attention-grabbing to see corporations steering away from it.

That “scaleup” is Genially’s most popular time period over “startup” is noteworthy. Joe Haslam, a professor at IE Enterprise Faculty in Madrid, has been arguing for nearly a decade that “scaleup is the brand new startup.” However even he concedes that the “scaleup” time period didn’t take off as a lot as he anticipated.