I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following:
A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business.
A friend of mine used:
A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years.
From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs that need to see the ligth. They should be supported by the government and the community, but they need very different tools from what we define as startups.
A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.
A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?
Depends on the market size. If the market is 100M, then a 500k profit effectively means your product will be inferior and poorly placed to evolve. If the market is 500k, then by all means go ahead. Startup are designed with explicit purpose of designing a product to capture that market without having to worry about the revenue during the time the product is being made. But of course capture does mean capture quickly because of the first mover advantage.
You say this as if venture capital is lying there on the ground for anyone to pick up. What VC do you know that aren't investing in companies that want to grow very quickly (or in companies that they then force to grow quickly)?
A seed round of million of dollars might not make sense for a flower shop, but could be reasonable if you plan to develop the next generation B2B flower shop SaaS integration.