Runway
The distance between now and the moment everyone quietly updates their LinkedIn.
"We have eight months of runway, which finance calls four."
#startup
13 entries
Burn rate
How fast the company sets investor money on fire to stay warm.
"Our burn rate is fine if you do not think about it, which is the strategy."
Down round
A funding event celebrated in the press release and mourned in the cap table.
"We raised at a down round, or as the email called it, a strategic recalibration."
Cap table
A spreadsheet that quietly decides who in this room actually got rich.
"I read the cap table once and never felt the same about my equity."
Bridge round
Emergency funding to reach the next funding you also cannot reach.
"We are raising a bridge round to bridge to the bridge."
Disrupt
To enter an industry you do not understand and add an app to it.
"We are disrupting laundry by making it a subscription you cannot cancel."
Growth hack
A trick to acquire users that works exactly once and ruins it for everyone.
"Our growth hack was emailing your entire contact list without asking. Bold."
Move fast and break things
A philosophy that works great until the thing you break is in production at 2 a.m.
"We moved fast and broke things. The things were customer payments."
North star
A guiding metric pointed at by everyone heading different directions.
"We aligned on a north star and then walked off four cliffs."
Ship it
A battle cry uttered moments before the rollback.
"He said ship it, and the incident channel lit up like a holiday."
Dogfooding
Using your own product and discovering exactly how bad it is.
"We started dogfooding and immediately filed forty bugs on ourselves."
Pivot
Founder for the first idea did not work, please keep funding us.
"We pivoted from dog social network to enterprise dog social network."
Pivot
A graceful word for sprinting in the opposite direction of last quarter promise.
"We pivoted so hard the old roadmap got vertigo."