In January, TechCrunch published a piece that looked like familiar startup news. Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Californian smartwatch developer Pebble, announced his return. He planned to revive the Pebble brand and launch an AI ring. Then came the part that mattered even more: his new company, Core Devices, would not call itself a startup. Migicovsky described a tiny team, no outside funding and a goal that feels almost out of place in tech today: to build something sustainable, profitable and long-running around an old idea.
Wording Means Everything
That choice of language tells a bigger story than any product announcement. For a long time, "startup" meant something precise. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator and one of Silicon Valley’s most influential thinkers, defined a startup as a company designed to grow very fast. Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur turned academic, described it as a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model. Eric Ries later shaped modern startup culture with the Lean Startup methodology, arguing that this labeling happens under extreme uncertainty and requires constant iteration. Strip away the frameworks, and the point stays simple: startups chase speed and scale.
This clarity, however, has faded in recent years. Today the startup label appears everywhere: a two-person consultancy calls itself a startup; a local retail brand with an online store adopts the label; a profitable, bootstrapped business with no ambition to scale beyond a niche still uses the term.
PR is partly to blame. The venture and startup market grew so fast in the 2020s and attracted so much attention from the media that using the word "startup" became a strategy to gain visibility—similar to how AI is now applied everywhere today from search platforms to air fryers.
The Communications Problem With "Startup"
This overuse creates a real problem. When everything becomes a startup, the word stops signaling anything useful. Journalists hear it and look for funding rounds, hypergrowth or disruption. Audiences expect bold ambition and market dominance. When the reality turns out to be slower, smaller or more deliberate, the story feels thin—even if the business itself is healthy.
So what should communicators and founders do if they want media attention without confusing their audience? Follow Migicovsky and use the term "startup" only when describing a new, fast-growing company backed by funding. For instance, one of our clients, Rainbow, can accurately be called a startup: it was established relatively recently (in 2021), is growing quickly and venture-backed.
More Options for "Startup"
Even then, precision matters. Our agency does not simply call Rainbow a startup; we add value by describing it as “a next-generation climate tech startup specializing in hyper-localised, short-term weather forecasting.”
Better yet, lead with the business model and market. Another client, Soula, could also be called a startup, but instead we describe it as an AI app for women's well-being. This way, journalists instantly understand what they are dealing with and do not have to research it. And the less time they spend decoding your pitch, the higher the chances of publication.
Evgenia Zaslavskaya is Founder and CEO at Zecomms Agency.