That doesn't really answer my question. Your original comment makes it sound like you don't know if the Kaufmann survey includes fast-growing companies, so you've assumed that it doesn't because then startups are often founded by people who are aged 40 and that contradicts your personal experience.
Sure it does. Your question was how could companies founded by "tech entrepreneurs specifically" "not qualify as startups?" I explained that you were making the common mistake of assuming that all newly founded technology companies were ipso facto startups. In fact the test of a startup is growth rate, and while technology is a common means to that end, there are plenty of companies working on technology (for example, consulting firms) that don't have rapid growth.
Obviously my knowledge of startups isn't limited to those we've funded.
If you're really interested in the question of successful founders' ages and not just using this as an excuse to argue with me, you can learn a lot from publicly available information. Make a list of the most successful startups of recent times, and find the average ages of their founders. E.g. what was the average age of the founders of Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook?
Paul - You are certainly describing something important but your narrower definition of startup conflicts with the prior definition as being a company that is searching for a repeatable and scalable business model (http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...). I am doing exactly this but I won't gamble on seeing growth sufficient to interest a VC.
What you seem to have identified in 'Startup = Growth' is a subset of the startup ecosystem more akin to 'wildcatting.' Both wildcatters and the ventures you seek risk capital from domain experts. These wildcatting risks and rewards are huge as you know better than most.
Maybe a more dignified word than 'wildcatting' can be found but 'startup' is taken.
I guess I'm unconvinced that using the top 5 or 10 consumer Internet startups is a good sample. But I take your point about arguing, and I'll poke around for some reliable data.
EDIT: So I looked at the actual Kauffman survey that everyone keeps referring to [1] to see how they selected the participants. The study was done in 2008, and here's how they selected the tech companies they surveyed:
To answer these questions, we surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 engineering and technology companies established from 1995 through 2005. These companies, identified from an existing dataset of corporate records in Dun & Bradstreet’s Million Dollar Database, have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees.
It seems then that the worst-case scenario here would be a company that's 13 years old and has $1m in sales. If you assume a starting revenue of $1000 / month that you mentioned in your recent essay, that's a weekly growth rate of 0.66%, which is pretty anemic by the standards you set out. On the other hand, if you assume that the average company in the survey is eight years old instead of 13, and that they have $5m in annual sales, the weekly growth rate climbs to 1.46%. Still a far cry from 5% weekly growth, but then 5% weekly growth for eight years isn't even remotely possible.
