JARGON BUSTER
The Startup World Is Full Of Jargon. Let Us Help You With A 100% Accurate* List Of Terms And Their Meaning
A
• 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.
B
• 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.
C
• 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.
D
• 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.
E
• 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.
F
• 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.
G
• 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.”
H
• 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.
I
• 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
• 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.
K
• 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.
L
• 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.
M
• 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.
N
• 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.
O
• 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.
P
• Pre-Money Valuation: An imaginary number that makes you sound successful at dinner parties.
• Pivot: Abandoning your original idea without admitting it failed.
• Preference Shares: What investors demand to ensure they get paid first if your company tanks.
Q
• 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.”
R
• 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
S
• 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.
T
• 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
U
• User Feedback: What you pretend to care about while ignoring all the bad reviews.
• Unicorn: A horse with a pointy end
V
• 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.
W
• 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
• 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.
Y
• 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.
Z
• 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.
