  Software startups continue to be important drivers of economy globally. As
the initial investment required to found a new software company becomes smaller
and smaller resulting from technological advances such as cloud technology,
increasing numbers of new software startups are born. Typically, the main
argument for studying software startups is that they differ from mature
software organizations in various ways, thus making the findings of many
existing studies not directly applicable to them. How, exactly, software
startups really differ from other types of software organizations as an
on-going debate. In this paper, we seek to better understand how software
startups differ from mature software organizations in terms of development
practices. Past studies have primarily studied method use, and in comparison,
we take on a more atomic approach by focusing on practices. Utilizing the
Essence Theory of Software Engineering as a framework, we split these practices
into categories for analysis while simultaneously evaluating the suitability of
the theory for the context of software startups. Based on the results, we
propose changes to the Essence Theory of Software Engineering for it to better
fit the startup context.
