What is a startup?

Whether you are at Dakar, Paris or San Francisco, Steve Blank’s definition is right everywhere: “A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”

How do you recognize a startup?

A startup has multiple quickly identifiable characteristics:
Temporary: A startup isn’t made to stay one forever. A startup is a phase of enterprise, with the purpose of leaving that phase as soon as possible. It’s the transformation phase of an idea into a profitable enterprise.
Search of a Business Model:Creating a startup is answering a need for something in a new way. And the challenge of a startup is to find and build the business model that goes with it. A Business model must be unique.
Repeatable:This means that a startup must look for a model where it can function on a larger scale on other places or by other people.
Scalable:The last great characteristic of a startup is its scalability. To have a model where the more costumers you have the greater the profits. So that the future customers always become less expensive than the past ones. It’s that scalability and the fact that the model is repeatable that allows a startup to grow so fast and so far in no time.

For example: The company named Uber officially founded by Garret Camp, Travis Kalanick and Oscar Salazar in 2009 under the name UberCab (“SuperTaxi”). The idea came to them in 2008 while they were at the event “LeWeb” in Paris. They were looking to move with a taxi but couldn’t find one, observing the same problem in the system of Taxis in Paris than in San Francisco. While they still work at StumbleUpon, they return to Silicon Valley and launch a private chauffeur service on demand named UberCab.
They had an idea and transformed it into a business company. They started testing their application in San Francisco and then in other cities. And now in 2017 Uber is present in 1000 cities around the globe thanks to an effective and repeatable business model. The expansion of Uber wasn’t done in a few weeks, it took multiple years and asked a lot of money and work.

To become a startup is not an objective. If you went to start something, you must create the best structure that will allow you to solve the problem you want to solve. And most importantly, don’t forget to find an economic model while you’re progressing and advancing.

To create your startup goes way beyond the numbers given by a market study, or a financial plan. It’s about going beyond analyses and surveys: To create your startup is first to believe in it. It’s a bet on the future. It’s to believe that society in which we live in is open to new things, it’s about going beyond the context of crisis to transform the problematics in opportunities. It’s to put dreams forward and ideas in common. It’s to idealize a world where creativity is rewarded, work valued again, money uninhibited, to make mistakes and question yourself, to look very closely, but to see a lot of things.

At first a startup is the story of a team animated by the same project, carried by the same values and the same passions.

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