Startup company
Company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model.
- Startup company500 related topics
Venture capital
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth (in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc).
Entrepreneurship
Creation or extraction of economic value.
While definitions of entrepreneurship typically focus on the launching and running of businesses, due to the high risks involved in launching a start-up, a significant proportion of start-up businesses have to close due to "lack of funding, bad business decisions, government policies, an economic crisis, lack of market demand, or a combination of all of these."
Disruptive innovation
Innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances.
Disruptive innovations tend to be produced by outsiders and entrepreneurs in startups, rather than existing market-leading companies.
Angel investor
An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity.
Business incubator
Business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services starting with management training and office space and ending with venture capital financing.
Silicon Valley
Region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation.
Silicon Valley is home to many of the world's largest high-tech corporations, including the headquarters of more than 30 businesses in the Fortune 1000, and thousands of startup companies.
Seed money
Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company.
Stanford University
Private research university located in the census-designated place of Stanford, California, near the city of Palo Alto.
In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups.
Venture round
A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors.
Private equity
Private equity (PE) typically refers to investment funds, generally organized as limited partnerships, that buy and restructure companies.
Innovations tend to be produced by founders at startups rather than existing organizations, private equity firms targets startups to create value by overcoming agency costs and better aligning the incentives of corporate managers with those of their shareholders. This means a greater share of firm retained earnings is taken out of the firm to distribute to shareholders than is reinvested in the firm's workforce or equipment. When a private equity firm purchases a small startup it can behave like venture capital and help the small firm reach a wider market. However, when private equity purchases a larger firm, the experience of being managed by private equity may lead to loss of product quality and low morale among the employees.