I absolutely hate startups. I've worked at startups, I constantly read about startups, I even wrote a 2,000 word article for this very magazine about startups but I hate "startups."
What I love is technology. I love when people find ways to use code to solve problems—when my life, or the lives of people anywhere in the world—is made vastly better through some carefully engineered lines of type or tiny processors. I love computer science. I love hardware engineering. I love user experiences. I looooooove Jony Ive.
But the way that the word startup has been abused over the past five years makes me furious. Everything these days is a startup. Except it's not. Kinda like "literally," "ridiculous," and "seriously," "startup" has almost entirely lost its meaning. Literally, the concept of a startup is seriously ridiculous. Ugh.
I'm all about people stretching their mind muscles and working on projects in their spare time. It's exactly what I do with this magazine, only I use English and PDFs instead of HTML and CSS. But let's call it what it is, whatever it is. For some people, it's an app. For others, a small business. For still others it's an enterprise. But I'm sick of startup. You're creative enough to start a business—you can think of a better way to refer to it.
Don't get me wrong, I wish more Penn students would have the courage and imagination to start something. I just also wish they wouldn't call it a startup.
