I’m working on a side project where I need to categorize startups into “successful” and “not successful,” but I’ve realized it’s not so straightforward. People throw around the word “success” pretty loosely sometimes it means raising funding, sometimes it means getting acquired, sometimes it’s just still being alive after a few years. But for the sake of my project, I want to define success in a way that’s actually measurable in data, not vague stuff like “great team” or “good culture.” Some of the measurable things I’ve been considering are: Survived more than 5 or 10 years Hit profit or some revenue milestones Raised funding Had an acquisition or IPO Shown team growth over time The tricky part is, all of these paint very different pictures. For example, if a startup is still alive after 7 years but is just 5 people and hasn’t grown, is that really “successful”? Or if it was acquired, does that count as success if it was just a small acqui-hire? So I’m curious, if you had to draw a line and classify startups as successful or not, what metrics would you personally use? Would you focus more on survival, on exits, on revenue, or something else entirely? I’d love to hear how other people think about this, especially from a data/metrics perspective.