Buzzword Library
Every term operators pretend to understand.
94 terms
10x
Startup Founder
The legally required multiplier for describing any improvement, no matter how incremental. Literally it means ten times better or bigger, used as shorthand for a transformative rather than merely incremental leap.
A/B test
Growth Marketer
Showing two versions to users to let data settle the argument nobody could win in the meeting. It's a controlled experiment comparing two variants to see which performs better on a chosen metric.
accretion
Investment Banker
When a deal makes the per-share numbers go up, which is banker for 'good.' Specifically, an acquisition is accretive when it increases the buyer's earnings per share.
action item
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
A task assigned in a meeting that gives the meeting the illusion of having accomplished something. It's a specific, assigned to-do with an owner that comes out of a discussion.
agentic
AI Startup Founder
When the AI does multiple things in a row without a human approving each one, which is either the future or a liability.
align
Office Newbie
To get everyone theoretically nodding in the same direction, if only for the length of the meeting. It means to bring people into agreement on goals or plans so work can move forward without conflicting priorities.
alignment
Management Consultant
Getting everyone to agree, or at least to stop visibly disagreeing in the meeting. It means ensuring all stakeholders share the same goals, priorities, and understanding before moving forward.
attribution
Growth Marketer
The eternal argument over which marketing channel actually deserves credit for a sale. It's the practice of assigning credit for conversions to the various touchpoints a customer interacted with.
backlog
Product Manager
The ever-growing graveyard of ideas that will be done 'eventually.' It's the prioritized list of features, fixes, and tasks a team has yet to work on.
bandwidth
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
A person's capacity to take on work, measured as if humans were internet connections. It refers to how much time and energy someone has available for additional tasks.
best practice
Management Consultant
What everyone else is doing, repackaged as expert advice. It refers to a method widely accepted as the most effective or proven approach to a given task.
blitzscale
Startup Founder
Growing recklessly fast on purpose and trusting the unit economics to sort themselves out later. It's a deliberate strategy of prioritizing breakneck speed over efficiency to win a market before competitors can, accepting heavy losses along the way.
boil the ocean
Management Consultant
To attempt something hopelessly over-broad — the thing consultants warn against while quietly doing it. It means trying to tackle too much at once instead of scoping a problem down to something achievable.
burn rate
Startup Founder
The speed at which you set investor money on fire each month, expressed politely as a metric. It's simply how much cash a company spends per month beyond what it earns — the key driver of how long the business can survive.
CAC
Growth Marketer
Customer Acquisition Cost — how much you spend to convince one person to buy, ideally less than they're worth. It's the total sales and marketing cost divided by the number of new customers gained, a core measure of growth efficiency.
circle back
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
A solemn promise to revisit a topic, functionally identical to never mentioning it again. It means to return to a subject or conversation at a later time.
close the deal
Investment Banker
Getting both sides to sign before anyone reconsiders or does more diligence. It means finalizing and legally completing a transaction.
comps
Investment Banker
Comparable companies cherry-picked to justify whatever valuation you already wanted. 'Comps' are similar businesses or past deals used as benchmarks to estimate what a company is worth.
conversion funnel
Growth Marketer
The leaky pipeline of steps users drop out of on the way to actually buying. It's the sequence of stages a prospect moves through — from first awareness to purchase — with people falling off at each step.
conviction
VC Partner
The confident certainty an investor projects right up until the moment they pass on the deal. Genuinely, it's the strength of belief a VC has in a company, which determines how aggressively they'll invest and at what price.
cross-functional
Chief of Staff
Involving multiple teams, and therefore three times the meetings and nobody clearly in charge. It describes work or a team that spans several departments, like engineering, sales, and marketing together.
deal flow
VC Partner · Investment Banker
The steady stream of startups pitching you — the lifeblood and bragging right of any investor. It refers to the quantity and quality of investment opportunities a firm sees, since better deal flow means better odds of finding a winner.
deep dive
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
To examine something in detail — or at least to schedule a meeting titled as if you will. It means a thorough, focused analysis of a specific topic.
default alive
Startup Founder
Startup-speak for 'we'd survive without more funding,' a status most founders aspire to and rarely have. Coined by Paul Graham, it means your current growth and finances would reach profitability before the cash runs out — the opposite being 'default dead.'
deliverable
Management Consultant
The slide deck produced to prove the consulting fee bought something tangible. More plainly, it's any concrete output a project is expected to hand over — a report, document, or working product.
dilution
Investment Banker
When a deal makes the per-share numbers go down, which is banker for 'don't mention it.' It happens when issuing new shares reduces existing shareholders' ownership or earnings per share.
disrupt
Startup Founder
To enter an existing industry and do the same thing slightly cheaper while calling it a revolution. Properly, the term means a new entrant upends incumbents by serving overlooked customers with a simpler, cheaper model that improves until it takes the market.
dry powder
VC Partner
Uninvested cash a fund is sitting on, named to sound like a frontier weapon rather than a bank balance. It's the capital a firm has raised but not yet deployed, ready to invest when the right opportunity appears.
EBITDA
Investment Banker
Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization — profit, once you ignore all the unflattering parts. It's a measure of a company's core operating profitability, stripping out financing and accounting effects to compare businesses more cleanly.
embeddings
AI Startup Founder
Turning words into numbers so the model can figure out that cat and kitten are related.
executive alignment
Chief of Staff
Getting the leadership team to publicly agree on something before the all-hands. It means ensuring senior leaders share the same priorities and message so the organization moves in one direction.
fine-tuning
AI Startup Founder
Training the model on your specific data so it fails in new and interesting ways.
flywheel
Growth Marketer
The comforting metaphor that growth, once started, spins faster on its own momentum. It describes a self-reinforcing system where each part feeds the next, so success compounds over time.
follow up
Office Newbie
Sending a second message asking about the first message nobody answered. It means to check back in on a request, task, or conversation to keep it moving.
follow-on
VC Partner
Putting more money into a company you already backed, partly from belief and partly to avoid admitting you were wrong. It's a follow-up investment in a later round to maintain or increase your ownership stake as the company grows.
force multiplier
Chief of Staff
Anything or anyone that makes everyone else more effective — a phrase borrowed wholesale from the military. It describes a tool, process, or person that dramatically increases the output of a whole team.
foundation model
AI Startup Founder
The giant model someone else trained that your entire product is built on top of.
founder-market fit
VC Partner
The idea that you, specifically, are destined to build this thing — ideally backed by a good origin story. It means the founder has unique insight, experience, or obsession that makes them especially suited to win in their particular market.
framework
Management Consultant
A 2x2 grid or labeled diagram that makes common sense look like a billable insight. In real use it's a structured way of organizing a problem so a team can analyze it consistently and reach a decision.
generative AI
AI Startup Founder
The blanket term applied to any product that needs to sound relevant in 2024.
growth hacking
Growth Marketer
Marketing rebranded with the word 'hacking' so it sounds clever and technical. It refers to rapid, experiment-driven, low-cost tactics aimed at growing a user base quickly.
hallucination
AI Startup Founder
When the model confidently states something false, which is a bug when it happens to you and a known limitation when it happens to your competitor.
headcount
Corporate Middle Manager
People, referred to as a budget line so layoffs sound like spreadsheet edits. It's simply the number of employees in a team or company, the unit by which staffing and budgets are planned.
hockey stick
Startup Founder
A growth chart that stays flat forever and then, in the projections, suddenly shoots straight up. It describes the shape of exponential growth — slow at first, then sharply accelerating — that investors hope for and founders love to forecast.
inference
AI Startup Founder
Running the model in production, which costs actual money unlike the demo.
large language model
AI Startup Founder
A very expensive autocomplete that everyone is pretending is intelligent.
latency
AI Startup Founder
How long the model takes to respond, which is always too slow for the demo.
leverage
Investment Banker
Using borrowed money to amplify returns, and occasionally to amplify catastrophe. In finance it's the use of debt to fund an investment, which magnifies both gains and losses.
loop in
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
To add someone to a thread so responsibility becomes pleasantly shared. It means to include a relevant person in a conversation or decision so they're informed.
low bandwidth
Corporate Middle Manager
A polite way to say you're too busy, or unwilling, to do the thing being asked. It describes having little spare capacity to take on more work.
low-hanging fruit
Management Consultant
The easy wins everyone already knew about, now formally identified for a fee. It means the tasks or opportunities that take the least effort for the most immediate benefit.
LTV
Growth Marketer
Lifetime Value — the total money a customer gives you before they wise up and leave. It estimates the total revenue or profit you expect from a customer over the entire relationship.
mandate
Investment Banker
The official engagement to run a deal — i.e. permission to start charging enormous fees. It's the formal authorization a client gives a bank to advise on or execute a transaction.
moat
Startup Founder
Whatever you claim stops competitors from copying you, usually right before they copy you. In real terms it's a durable competitive advantage — network effects, brand, switching costs, proprietary tech — that protects your business over time.
move the needle
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
To produce a result big enough to actually matter, as opposed to most work. It means to make a meaningful, measurable impact on an important metric or goal.
multimodal
AI Startup Founder
When the model handles text and images, used in pitch decks to mean it handles everything.
multiple
Investment Banker
The ratio you slap on earnings to conjure a valuation, higher if you say it confidently. A valuation multiple expresses a company's value as a factor of some financial metric — like earnings or revenue — to benchmark it against peers.
MVP
Product Manager
Minimum Viable Product — the embarrassing first version you ship and pretend was intentional. It's the simplest version of a product that still delivers value, built to test an idea with real users before investing further.
north star metric
Product Manager
The single number the whole team rallies around and gently games. It's the one key metric that best captures the core value your product delivers, used to focus and align everyone's efforts.
operating cadence
Chief of Staff
The recurring rhythm of meetings and reviews that makes a company feel like it's running on schedule. It's the regular schedule of planning, check-ins, and reviews that keeps an organization coordinated.
operationalize
Chief of Staff
To turn a nice idea into an actual repeatable process, said to sound more rigorous than 'do it.' It means to put a strategy or concept into practice through concrete systems and workflows.
pattern match
VC Partner
Deciding whether a founder will succeed based on how much they remind you of someone who already did. More charitably, it's using lessons from past deals to quickly assess new ones — efficient, but prone to bias.
portfolio
VC Partner
The collection of bets a VC takes credit for when they win and never mentions when they don't. It's simply the full set of companies a fund has invested in, managed as a group so the big winners outweigh the inevitable losers.
power law
VC Partner
The VC truth that one giant win matters more than every other investment combined. Statistically, venture returns follow a power-law distribution where a tiny number of investments produce nearly all the profit, so funds chase massive outliers, not safe singles.
prioritization
Product Manager · Chief of Staff
The painful art of deciding which important things you will openly neglect. It's the process of ranking tasks or features by value and effort so the team works on what matters most first.
product-market fit
Startup Founder
The magical moment when people actually want the thing you built instead of you begging them to. In practice it means you've found a product that satisfies strong demand in a specific market, usually signaled by rapid organic growth and customers you can't onboard fast enough.
prompt engineering
AI Startup Founder
The art of talking to a computer in exactly the right way so it does what you wanted anyway.
quick win
Management Consultant
A small, fast result shown early to justify the much larger invoice coming later. It's an easily achievable improvement delivered quickly to build momentum and confidence in a larger effort.
RAG
AI Startup Founder
Retrieval Augmented Generation, feeding the model documents at runtime so it sounds like it knows things.
retention
Growth Marketer
Keeping the customers you already have, which is cheaper than admitting they're leaving. It measures how many users continue using your product over time rather than churning.
roadmap
Product Manager
A confident timeline of features that everyone knows will change by next sprint. Properly, it's a high-level plan showing what a product team intends to build and roughly when, used to align stakeholders.
runway
Startup Founder
How many months of cash you have left before payroll becomes a personal problem. Concretely, it's your cash balance divided by your monthly net burn — how long you can keep operating before you must raise more money or turn a profit.
ship it
Product Manager
The triumphant declaration that something is being released, bugs and all. It simply means to release a product or feature to users.
single source of truth
Chief of Staff
The one document everyone is supposed to trust, and the four others they actually use. It's the authoritative, central place where a given piece of data or information is maintained.
sprint velocity
Product Manager
A made-up number measuring how fast the team ships, used mainly to feel productive. In practice it's the amount of work — often in 'story points' — a team completes per sprint, used to forecast how much they can take on next.
stakeholder
Product Manager
Anyone with enough power to derail your roadmap in a single Slack message. Formally, it's any person or group with an interest in a project — customers, executives, or teams affected by the outcome.
stakeholder management
Chief of Staff
The delicate art of keeping powerful people feeling informed and important. It's the ongoing work of identifying key stakeholders and managing their expectations and communications.
strategic initiative
Chief of Staff
A regular project promoted to important-sounding status so it gets budget and attention. It's a major, high-priority effort tied directly to the company's long-term goals.
swim lane
Chief of Staff
Your clearly defined area of responsibility, mostly invoked to tell people to stay out of yours. It refers to a distinct zone of ownership that clarifies who is responsible for what.
synergies
Investment Banker
The cost savings promised to justify a merger, usually meaning layoffs. They're the financial benefits — reduced costs or increased revenue — expected when two companies combine.
synergy
Management Consultant
The vague promise that combining two things will magically produce more than their sum. In business it refers to the added value created when two teams, products, or companies work together more efficiently than apart.
take it offline
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
To stop discussing something in the meeting, usually because it got interesting or awkward. It means to move a tangential or detailed conversation out of the current group setting.
TAM
Startup Founder
Total Addressable Market — the gloriously huge number you get by assuming literally everyone on Earth will buy your product. In reality it's the total annual revenue available if you captured 100% of your market, used to size the opportunity and make a pitch deck look exciting.
term sheet
VC Partner
The non-binding love letter outlining how much of your company you're about to give away. It's the document laying out the key terms of a proposed investment — valuation, amount, and investor rights — before the final legal contracts.
thesis
VC Partner
The investor's grand worldview that conveniently predicts whichever company just pitched them. In practice it's a fund's stated belief about where a market is heading, which guides what kinds of startups they choose to back.
token
AI Startup Founder
The unit the model charges you for, roughly a word, adding up faster than you expect.
top of funnel
Growth Marketer
The wide first stage where you attract strangers who mostly won't buy anything. It's the awareness phase of the marketing funnel, focused on reaching a large audience of potential customers.
touch base
Corporate Middle Manager · Office Newbie
A vague request for a short conversation with no clear purpose or agenda. It simply means to check in briefly with someone to share updates or coordinate.
user story
Product Manager
A one-sentence wish written as 'As a user, I want...' so engineers know what to build. It's a short, plain-language description of a feature told from the end user's perspective, capturing who wants what and why.
user-centric
Product Manager
The claim that you build for users, asserted most loudly when building for executives. It describes a design approach that puts the needs and experience of actual users at the center of every decision.
value creation
Management Consultant
Any activity that can be plausibly linked to making the client more money. Concretely, it's the work of increasing a company's worth, whether through growth, efficiency, or improved margins.
vector database
AI Startup Founder
Where you store the embeddings, described as a core part of your infrastructure.
viral loop
Growth Marketer
A mechanism where each user supposedly brings in more users — dreamed about far more than achieved. It's a self-reinforcing cycle where using the product naturally prompts users to invite others, driving organic growth.
workstream
Management Consultant
A chunk of a project given an important name so everyone knows whose fault it is. It's a distinct strand of work within a larger initiative, each with its own owner, tasks, and timeline.