In the 1550s, a startup was an upstart, someone who rose above their station.
The compound "start-up" appears in English around the 1550s, meaning an upstart, a person who had risen suddenly and presumably above their proper station.1 The root word "start" descends from Old English styrtan, meaning to leap or spring suddenly, from a Proto-Germanic root suggesting brisk, abrupt movement.
For four centuries, the word carried a note of social suspicion. To be a start-up was to be presumptuous, someone who had moved too fast.
The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of "startup" in its modern business sense in a 1976 Forbes article about investing in new companies in the electronic data processing field.2 A year later, Business Week described "an incubator for startup companies, especially in the fast-growth, high-technology fields."3
The word emerged from Silicon Valley at the moment when personal computing made it possible to build a company with a fraction of the capital required in the industrial era. Venture capital firms adopted the term to describe the specific class of young companies they funded, distinguishing them from ordinary small businesses.
Usage of "startup" rose steadily through the 1990s and peaked around 2002, shortly after the burst of the dot-com bubble. It declined between 2002 and 2008 before climbing again with the rise of mobile platforms and cloud computing.4
The word that once described someone who had risen too far now describes an entire category of ambition. Eric Ries published The Lean Startup in 2011, formalizing a methodology around rapid iteration and validated learning that further cemented the term's association with technology and growth.5 In the 1550s, a startup was a person who jumped too high. In the 1970s, it became a company designed to do nothing else.