Ever wonder who coined 'startup' as we know it?

The word 'startup' existed long before anyone pitched a deck or disrupted an industry. For most of the 20th century, it simply described the act of starting any business — a dry cleaner, a bakery, a widget factory. The term was procedural, not aspirational.

That changed in the 1970s when Silicon Valley began to congeal as a distinct ecosystem. Venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia formalized in the early '70s, and suddenly there was a category of company that didn't fit the old models: high-risk, high-reward technology ventures designed not to generate steady profit but to scale explosively or die trying. These needed a name that separated them from normal small businesses.

'Startup' — no hyphen, newly stylized — became shorthand for this specific gamble. It implied speed, uncertainty, and venture backing. By the 1980s, business schools were teaching 'startup management' as a discipline distinct from entrepreneurship. The dot-com era cemented it, and now we can't escape it: every coffee shop founder calls themselves a startup, even when they're just... starting up.

The real shift wasn't linguistic but economic. The modern 'startup' isn't about starting. It's about the promise of exponential growth, the hunt for venture money, and the willingness to burn cash in pursuit of market dominance. The 1970s gave us the word. The decades since turned it into a lifestyle brand.