Disrupting disruption with disruptive disruptions since 2010.
The art of watering down your ownership stake in a company, usually because someone with deeper pockets decided your equity pie needs more slices. In the startup world, this happens when new investors come aboard and everyone's percentage shrinks faster than your enthusiasm during Series D. It's not personal, it's just cap table mathematics.
Moving to build or sell products at a lower layer of the technology infrastructure, typically where margins are thinner but the market is larger. Often happens when companies realize their original niche is too small.
The percentage discount early investors get when their notes convert to equity, rewarding them for investing before a priced round. It's the early bird special of startup investing, typically 15-25%.
To abandon ship faster than a rat on the Titanic. In startup parlance, when a feature, product, or entire business model gets the axe because it's hemorrhaging money or nobody wants it. No ceremony, no fanfare—just gone.
The phase between seed funding and Series A where many startups run out of money and crash; basically startup purgatory.
The soul-crushing moment when a founder's ownership percentage shrinks because the company issued more shares to new investors. It's weaker coffee, but for equity—you still own shares, they're just worth relatively less of the pie. Every funding round brings this special joy, where you simultaneously celebrate getting money and mourn losing control.
The early-internet ideology that all digital content and services should be freely available to everyone, or at least subsidized by someone else willing to foot the bill. A utopian dream that helped kill the dot-com bubble.
The accumulating list of failed startups and failed startup founders—a real place we're all slowly joining.
A contractual mechanism that shields early investors from dilution when a startup raises money at a lower valuation than previous rounds. It's basically insurance against your company becoming less cool than you thought it was.
A limit on how much an investor's ownership can be diluted by future funding rounds. Basically the investor saying 'screw everyone who comes after me.'
Startups built on fundamental scientific breakthroughs rather than clever software—the kind of company that requires physics PhDs and takes 10 years to become profitable, beloved by investors who want long-term moonshots.
A competitive advantage based on how easily you can reach customers. Spoiler alert: most startups don't have one and never will.
The engineering audit where technical experts examine your code, architecture, and tech debt to see if you're about to implode.
The process of pitching your deck to many investors in sequence, iterating based on feedback. Like a miserable version of speed dating.