"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth." - pg

I guess everyone is entitled to interpret words however they like, but the salient attribute of a startup is exactly what the word means: it's a new venture. And from the perspective of a landlord, that's what matters. New companies are the least predictable in their needs, their revenue stream, and their long-term prospects. They tend to have inexperienced managers and flighty owners. All of these things are true regardless of how they are funded, what industry they operate in or whether the owners are trying to become huge overnight, bootstrap into a comfortable living, or whatever else.

Established companies grow and shrink, too. They close offices and factories, open new ones, and occasionally file for bankruptcy protection. But they do these things much less frequently than a new company, and they do it with the backing of a much larger and more reliable cash flow. That cash flow means that even in bankruptcy, an established company's creditors usually end up with a significant recovery. From a landlord's perspective, these are the things that make established companies more attractive than startups. Thus, in this context at least, "startup" means nothing but "new company" and carries none of the other connotations that most people here assume when hearing the term.

Well, that's his view on it. I and many others would disagree fundamentally on those points.

There are many other types of business besides startups, and not all technology businesses are startups. That's fine, many of them work very well. Rapid growth is not the only way to run a successful business. But they're not "startups," by definition, they're some other kind of business.

You can, of course, attempt to appropriate the word "startup," redefine it to mean something else, and then attempt to get others to use your new definition, but empirically it seems that almost everyone is using pg's definition above for that word.