The Startup Playbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1What Is a Startup?

Can you create a high-growth startup by combining a bunch of small businesses or what some people call local businesses—those with a geographically limited customer base? I (Rajat) tried to do exactly that with my third startup—combine a number of local businesses. I was a co-founder of a company called Interliant that focused on acquiring and integrating small web hosting companies.

In three years, Interliant acquired over thirty of these types of companies and tried to combine them into one high-growth, scalable startup. While most of the companies that we acquired weren't startups themselves, our goal was to inject a startup ethos into them and their teams so that we could create one of the largest web-hosting firms in the world.

In Interliant's case, we took a nontraditional path to building a startup. We created a very fast-growing company that eventually went public (and was subsequently acquired for pennies on the dollar during the dotcom downturn) using individual building blocks that weren't, themselves, startups. We never felt confined to any particular startup model, which contributed to the fast growth of the company.

While we probably wouldn't recommend this particular model of a startup for first-time entrepreneurs because of the degree of execution difficulty, it does serve the key point: startups come in many different flavors.

The Definition of Startup

What is a startup? There is no agreed upon definition of what exactly a startup ...