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In recent times, incubators, business angels, IPOs, pitches, unicorns, crowdfunding and coworking have become frequent terms on television, on newspaper covers and on social media. All of these terms are related to startups and are part of this new economic era.
First of all, what is a startup? It is, above all, a group of people creating an innovative, repeatable, scalable and value-generating business model, working in conditions of great uncertainty. The term startup began to be popularized in the 90s and emerged in Silicon Valley, a region of California, in the United States of America.
This increasingly democratic world of startups makes it possible for anyone with entrepreneurial skills and innovative ideas to create highly successful and quickly scalable businesses across the world. In Portuguese society, an entrepreneurial spirit has grown in recent years that has helped our country enter this new and prominent world. I consider them to be the new Discoveries and I seriously believe that, if we continue to have the vision to take advantage and invest in this path, Portugal will grow economically in a stable manner.
One of the most important contributions to Portugal being considered a prominent nation in the world of startups was the arrival of the largest entrepreneurship event in Europe, the Web Summit, to the country, which brings together thousands of people from all over the world every year. The creation of incubators and acceleration programs have contributed to the proliferation of startups in Portugal, a phenomenon that provides important and fundamental help to empower any entrepreneur with a business strategy with a greater probability of success.
The term incubator originated in 1959, by North American businessman Joseph Mancuso, who owned a property leased to an agricultural machinery factory, which was left unoccupied. His 25,000 square meter property was left empty with no prospects of being able to find a new tenant again. Faced with this problem, he decided to divide the space to attract smaller entrepreneurs. One of the first tenants was a poultry company. Due to this fact, they began to call this property an incubator and thus gave rise to the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Vallley.
Another term widely used in this crazy world is “Business Angels”, which are private investors who decide to invest their own money in Startups. IPO is an acronym for Initial Public Offering, which is basically when a company sells shares to the public for the first time. Pitch pitches are also very well known, they are presentations lasting between 3 and 5 minutes with the main objective of arousing the public’s interest. One of the words that deserves the most respect in this world is unicorns, the name given to startups with a market value of more than a billion dollars.
Finally, we come to crowdfunding, obtaining capital via collective financing, in small contributions from a large number of people. Coworking is a concept widely used in the creation of startups, which are spaces shared by several companies for fun. These companies promote the exchange of knowledge and experiences in a more informal environment. This crazy world is just beginning and the Portuguese are in the spotlight.