A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc.. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Robert Toru Kiyosaki is an American businessman and author, known for the Rich Dad Poor Dad series of personal finance books. He is the founder of the Rich Dad Company, a private financial education company that provides personal finance and business education to people through books and videos, and Rich Global LLC, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Emanuel James Rohn, professionally known as Jim Rohn, was an American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker. He wrote numerous books including How to obtain wealth and happiness.
Steve Blank is an American entrepreneur, educator, author and speaker based in Pescadero, California.
An angel investor is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. Angel investors often provide support to startups at a very early stage, once or in a consecutive manner, and when most investors are not prepared to back them. In a survey of 150 founders conducted by Wilbur Labs, about 70% of entrepreneurs will face potential business failure, and nearly 66% will face this potential failure within 25 months of launching their company. A small but increasing number of angel investors invest online through equity crowdfunding or organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share investment capital and provide advice to their portfolio companies. The number of angel investors has greatly increased since the mid-20th century.
Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. Lean startup emphasizes customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning. This methodology enables recovery from failures more often than traditional ways of product development.
Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic. He is Distinguished Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is also author of books Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back, Driver in the Driverless Car,Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, and Immigrant Exodus.
Jørn Lyseggen is a Norwegian serial entrepreneur, patent inventor and the founder and Executive Chairman of Meltwater and the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST).
The Startup Visa is a temporary conditional residence permit in different countries. It aims at introducing a visa category for entrepreneurs raising outside funding and converts to a permanent residency visa if certain conditions are met.
Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle is a 2009 book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer about the economy of Israel. It examines how Israel, a 60-year-old nation with a population of 7.1 million, was able to reach such economic growth that "at the start of 2009, some 63 Israeli companies were listed on the NASDAQ, more than those of any other foreign country."
Mark Suster is an American businessman and investor. He is a managing partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in Los Angeles. Aside from his business career, Suster is also a prominent blogger in the American high-technology startup scene and venture capital world.
Brittany "Brit" Morin is an American venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and technologist. She is the co-founder of and managing partner at Offline Ventures, an early stage venture fund and studio, founder and CEO of Brit + Co, a media and digital education company based in San Francisco, the founder of Selfmade, an education and community platform for female entrepreneurs, and the founder of BFF, an open-access community for women and nonbinary people in Web3.
Brad Feld is an American entrepreneur, author, blogger, and venture capitalist at Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado, a firm he started with partners Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.
OurCrowd is an online global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individual accredited investors to invest and engage in emerging technology companies at an early stage while still privately held. Based in Jerusalem, the company launched in February 2013, and has since opened overseas branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Singapore, Brazil, and the UAE.
Onevest, a New York–based investment crowdfunding site for startups that was acquired by Business Rockstars in April 2018, allowed entrepreneurs to raise capital from accredited investors. In July 2014, startups launching on Onevest had collectively raised over $66 million.
ShaoLan Hsueh is a London-based Taiwanese author, designer, venture capitalist, tech entrepreneur, podcast host, speaker, and the creator of Chinese language learning system Chineasy. As a college undergraduate in Taiwan, she wrote several bestselling software books that were widely distributed by Microsoft, and co-founded Internet company pAsia. In 2005, while studying for a master's degree at Cambridge, she founded Caravel Capital. Hsueh introduced Chineasy during a 2013 TED Talk, and subsequently authored several books and other learning tools to distribute the method.
In business, a unicorn is a startup company valued at over US$1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market. The term was first published in 2013, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.
Ido Leffler is an Israeli-born Australian entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. He is the co-founder of Yoobi, Yes To Inc., Cheeky, Brandless, and Beach House Group.
