Chapter 1: What Is a Start-up?
Can you create a high-growth start-up 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 start-up—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 start-up. While most of the companies that we acquired weren't start-ups themselves, our goal was to inject a start-up 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 non-traditional path to building a start-up. 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, start-ups. We never felt confined to any particular start-up model, which contributed to the fast growth of the company.
While we probably wouldn't recommend this particular model of a start-up for first-time entrepreneurs because of the degree of execution difficulty, it does serve the key point: start-ups come in many different flavours.
The Definition of Start-up
What is a start-up? There is no agreed upon definition of what exactly a start-up ...
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