How do you measure Startup Success?

I measure success from the perspective of what we're trying to accomplish overall with the company and then steps along the journey.

Overall - creating a profitable, sustainable company is #1. There are lots of success measurements you can float around that - you're successful if the company does something of real social value...you're successful if it is a great work environment...whatever you want. But if you don't generate a profit, aren't sustainable, then really the rest don't matter because you can only last so long. So for me, success is profit and staying in business.

Along the journey, there are many incremental successes. It's raising funds, launching a viable product, getting customers...And successes after that in terms of your exit strategy - selling the company, going public, whatever.

Most investors would probably consider the company's market valuation the sole measure of its success.

When I don't have any skin in the game, I usually think of 2 main elements:

1. The annual profit generated by the business, or sometimes profit in conjunction with revenue. The reason why I sometimes include revenue is that some areas of business are just inherently low-margin (low-cost airlines, farming, many others), and these should not be considered insignificant just because their profits are low.

2. My subjective judgment on the 'merit' of the underlying service or product created. Online casinos, pornography and sugar-water with alcohol (Bacardi Breezer etc) are IMO examples of products of little or no merit for mankind. If an entrepreneur makes his business in a less worthy but still perfectly legal area, then I think him less accomplished than someone with the same profit in a 'normal' line of business.

If I worked in the company I would have a very different viewpoint... Human values, the other people there, the quality of the working environment, the shared successes and many other things would be factors.

How high is up? It all depends on your role (investor vs. founder vs. bootstrapping startup), where are you starting from (very first startup project, just quit Google to pursue dream of augmented reality sunglasses), and what are you goals (another giant company or a great living).

this is an easy question.

simply ask the following question:

How do you measure Startup Failure ? the answer is there.