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🧵 Thread (14 tweets)

Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Startup is an interesting word. I do think it's overused. But it can be useful. To me it describes a fast-growing biz in 'disequilibrium'

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

Eg Facebook was a startup until it started selling ads. PayPal was a startup until they didn't need to pay people to join.

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

I sell t-shirts on the side. It's a small business. It's not a startup; it doesn't grow fast & there's no disequilibrium. Each sale = profit

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

This isn't exactly the case for some ecommerce startups that raise VC money & sell at a loss to win market share... it does get complicated

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

It's funny and revealing when people start small businesses and call them startups. The assumption is startups = fashionable, high status

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

Who was the most fashionable startup founder before Zuck? I did a school project on Pierre Omidyar in 2007, called him "businessman" iirc

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

Thinking about oral histories written with contemporary language. "The lightbulb was the first killer app", "bronze disrupted iron", etc

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

There are trends in fashionable lenses just as much as there are trends in actual fashion. Best way to see this is to read old news, I think

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

Love this piece by Adam Gopnik that talks about how our relationship with technology changes while staying the same: https://t.co/7QzTFSRCRq

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

People used to worry that train rides and radios were corrupting minds. (People were surely skeptical of fire and the wheel in similar ways)

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

Where am I going with this... I'm thinking abt our relationship with words and language – we're all playing this elaborate multiplayer game

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

Every word is a roughly-hewn representation of an idea, with some vague consensus about what it means. We stretch, distort, invert, resist

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

Oh wait, I remember now – we called Pierre Omidyar an _entrepreneur_. The word was extra popular in 2000s Singapore. Media and govt loved it

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Visakan Veerasamy@visakanv• over 8 years ago

Replying to @visakanv

It was cool to be a musician, artist, DJ. When I look them up on LinkedIn, many are now 'founder-CEOs'. See Hayley Williams' twitter bio

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