•    Agile: The art of rewriting priorities faster than your dev team can say “Weren’t we doing something else yesterday?”

•    Accelerator: A program that fast-tracks your burnout while taking 7% of your company.

•    Advisors: People who give generic advice, take equity, and disappear when the hard questions start.

•    Burn Rate: The speed at which you set investor cash on fire, hoping the smoke attracts more investors.

•    Bootstrap: Turning your personal savings & credit cards into a business model.

•    Board Meeting: An event where investors gently remind you the runway was six months... and is now six weeks.

•    Bridge Loan: A short-term funding strategy that is optimistically called a 'bridge' but often leads directly off a cliff.

•    Culture: Crafting values like “Transparency” while quietly firing the guy who asked about salaries.

•    Customer Journey: The saga your users go through before deciding the app is too buggy to use.

•    Cap Table: A spreadsheet that shows exactly how little of the company you still own.

•    Deck: A work of fiction with numbers and buzzwords that ends with “We just need $1M to take off.”

•    Due Diligence: The process where investors find the skeletons you forgot to bury in your data room.

•    Disruptive: A buzzword you must use in pitches. Actual disruption optional.

•    Exit Strategy: The ‘plan’ you tell investors, knowing full well it’s as accurate as a finger in the air.

•    Equity: A magical currency that pays zero bills but keeps employees hanging on for hope.

•    Entrepreneur: Sounds great, also quite often the ‘CEO’, but really is a shitty job.

•    Founder: Walks a tightrope between ‘optimist’ and ‘complete liar’ - professional beggar of funds.

•    Funding Round: A high-stakes game of “Will they ghost me or send me a term sheet?”

•    FOMO: What you weaponize in pitches when trying to get rich people to give you money.

•    Forecasting: The act of guessing what chaos lies ahead.

•    Growth Hacking: Spamming strangers on LinkedIn and calling it “customer acquisition.”

•    Go-To-Market Strategy: The 12-slide plan that boils down to “We’ll try everything and see what sticks.”

•    Hustle: Working 14-hour days while convincing yourself you're “living the dream”

•    Hackathon: A weekend where you code nonstop and create something useless, yet “innovative.”

•    Human Resources: The department that says “we’re a family” but forgets your birthday.

•    IPO: An exit that happens to someone else’s company, not yours.

•    Investor Call: A one-hour meeting where you pretend everything’s fine and they pretend they believe you.

•    Iterate: A fancy way of admitting you’re guessing and hoping no one notices.

•    J-Curve: A graph-shape that investors expect. Reality looks more like a flatline and a prayer.

•    Jobs: The mythical positions you promise to create after “scaling up.”

•    Just-in-Time: The approach you take to learning legal terms right before signing that fucking huge contract.

•    KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): Numbers you choose to look good when other numbers look awful.

•    Knowledge Transfer: That thing your CTO doesn’t do before they quit.

•    Lean Startup: A methodology designed to help you fail faster while spending less money.

•    Launch Day: The day you find out nobody cares about your product except your mother.

•    Late-Stage Startup: The point where you’re too old to be novel but too small to make a profit.

•    Lifetime Value (LTV): The total amount of money a customer will pay before inevitably churning.

•    MVP (Minimum Viable Product): The barebones version of your product that’s just good enough not to embarrass you….too often. 

•    Market Fit: When two friendlies reluctantly use your product and you call it “traction.”

•    Monthly Burn: A phrase you whisper while sobbing into your accounting software.

•    Non-Dilutive Funding: Money that doesn’t cost equity, but also doesn’t exist when you need it.

•    Net Revenue Retention: A complicated way of saying, “How much money are we still squeezing out of customers?”

•    Networking Event: Where you perfect the “fake laugh while holding warm white wine.”

•    NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement): A legal document startups use to make you feel important while hiding that they have no real secrets.

•    Onboarding: The process of confusing new users just enough that they question whether your product was the right choice 

•    OKRs: Another acronym to track all the things you’re not getting done.

•    Options: A fancy term investors use when they have no idea if your company will succeed.

•    Pre-Money Valuation: An imaginary number that makes you sound successful at dinner parties.

•    Pivot: Abandoning your original idea without admitting it failed.

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•    Preference Shares: What investors demand to ensure they get paid first if your company tanks.

•    Quarterly Goals: Arbitrary targets designed to keep everyone stressed until next quarter.

•    Quick Wins: Anything you can slap into a meeting slide to make it look like you’re making progress.

•    Quitting: The thing you consider every week, right before deciding to “power through.”

•    Retention: The art of convincing customers to stick around for one more billing cycle.

•    Runway: How long before you run out of cash and excuses.

•    ROI: What your investors will never see but you’ll still promise.

•    Round: Where you keep going back to investors asking for more lifelines

•    Seed Round: The first infusion of capital that helps you build your MVP—and lose 20% of your equity.

•    Series A: The point where your company goes from “fun experiment” to “financial responsibility.”

•    Scaling: The moment when you realise growth makes everything worse.

•    Stealth Mode: You claim secrecy; reality is you just haven’t built anything yet.

•    Term Sheet: A document outlining the deal investors want you to agree to without reading too closely.

•    Traction: When your product is slightly less ignored than before.

‘Proves’ your startup isn’t dead yet. 

•    Team Offsite: 6 hours in the pub

•    User Feedback: What you pretend to care about while ignoring all the bad reviews.

•    Unicorn: A horse with a pointy end

•    VC (Venture Capitalist): People with nice shoes and high expectations.

•    Visionary: The title you give yourself when your idea hasn’t made money yet.

•    Valuation: A made-up number that determines how much your company is worth on paper.

•    Warm Lead: A potential customer who is slightly less indifferent than everyone else.

•    Whiteboard Session: Drawing arrows and boxes until you convince yourself you’re being productive.

•    Winning: When you successfully hide how screwed you are.

•    Work-Life Balance: Bollocks. 

•    X Factor: The thing you claim your startup has when you can’t think of anything better.

•    Exit Multiples: A calculation used to justify wild guesses about what your company could sell for.

•    Yield Curve: A graph you add to your pitch because it looks technical.

•    YOY (Year Over Year): A fancy way to compare this year’s disappointment to last year’s.

•    Zoom Call: A place where your co-founder accidentally unmutes during a rant and calls his brother an “asshole”. 

•    Zombie Startup: The walking dead of the startup world— that’s technically alive but has no real prospects for growth or success.