Startup companies are an important cog in the wheel of economy for any country, more so for the ecosystem they are a part of. 

The startup boom has been accelerated by the growth of internet. A vast majority of the startups are in the technology industry itself, woven around social media. The high reachability allows startups to stay close to their revenue — the consumers. 

Startup companies do not form the high density cycles of the ecosystem they are a part of. They are those pieces of the jigsaw which are annoyingly necessary but often out of sight. Once the idea is implemented, you tend to feel, “Oh! How good that someone did that.” One needs to look at startups from the vantage point of a potential consumer to make sense of their position in the industry.

Startups are, above all, problem solvers., but not just any general problem  — the ones that need getting hands dirty. They are the ones that you shun subconsciously. You don’t want to solve that problem yourself but wish that somebody could do that for you. That is the mental block that startups exploit and founders make fortune out of.

Take Paypal or Airbnb, both of which solved problems that have existed for a long time. 

Online payments were insecure and a complex puzzle that needed someone to get their hands dirty and figure out all the legal entanglements. Paypal got on to that and made a fortune. Incidentally, Paypal’s co-founder Elon Musk is the real life equivalent of Iron Man. The physics genius also co-founded SpaceX, a company that makes rockets, along with Tesla Motors which makes electric cars.

Airbnb, or Air Bed and Breakfast, took a simple idea – a marketplace for people to rent out homes and spare rooms as if they were hotels – and turned it into a revenue-generating business.

Startups cannot take on mainstream problems. The big sharks will corner them out economically. There are exceptions, like Google and Facebook, but they were riding on the wave of a completely new paradigm. They had the advantage of being the first explorers. Most startups now take up those small problems that are big enough to get the bucks out of the pocket, yet small enough that big companies will spend their human resource and advertising budgets on them.

Startups are agile and free from the shackles of management structures. This gives them the freedom to max out on solving problems, something that the mid-size and higher companies take a lot of strategizing with.

There is a whole ecosystem in place for anyone willing to start a startup company. Venture Capitalists and Startup Accelerators act as catalysts. The latter provides guidance to the founders, most of whom are youngsters out of college or college dropouts.

A startup is not started with the aim of taking over the industry. On the contrary, startups are looking to be acquired by the bigger sharks. 

Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, the biggest startup school in United States and the co-founder of one of the first startups, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo. He talks extensively of the nature of startups in his book Hackers and Painters and observes that work at startups is more compressed than the work an individual might perform at a big, stable company. Founders typically work hard during a period of a year or two and earn their millions while employees who work for stable companies earn steady incomes in a period of decades.

N.C. State has an incubator which adopts startups in their early growth. The N.C. State Technology Incubator nurtures entrepreneurs as they build their businesses. It provides startups with rented office space, conference facilities, laboratories and other amenities that startups require to establish themselves.

The Poole College of Management also hosted a Startup Madness March 27 in Hunt Library, where young startups competed and pitched not their ideas or business plans, but working prototypes to a panel of judges.

Startups require qualities from founders that are found rarely — street smartness, determination and foresight. If you have a great idea and are willing to work for it, the market is hot for you to make your millions.