Then it has a notion of "growing large beyond the solo founder". But I argue that most of the time, this is just the story they tell to justify their losing money. As in: "we are not profitable YET, because we need to grow larger to reach the scale we need, hence you should give us more money".

> A startup can be profitable.

Is Logitech a startup? They (or at least not so long ago) call themselves a startup. I disagree: it's an established company.

If a company of 20 employees has been profitable for 10 years and doesn't grow, would you call it a startup? If it is profitable and keeps growing while staying profitable, wouldn't you say it's "expanding"?

Now if that company of 20 employees suddently gets a big funding to try to become a company of 2000 and goes into a state where it may well bankrupt in the next 2 years if it fails, then I would again consider it a startup: it's "trying a completely new business model" (one that works for 2000 employees instead of 20, probably with the goal of making the leadership rich).

Another thing is that startups usually tend to be those Ponzi schemes where employees are badly treated but get not-so-worthy stock options (that may compensate someday for the bad conditions, but often don't) while the founders get a shot at getting rich. If your company is profitable and stable, it's much harder to do: how would you justify the bad conditions if you could actually afford better ones?

But of course, saying that you are a startup is "cool", which is exactly why Logitech was saying it though they were one of the big tech companies in the world.