Disrupting disruption with disruptive disruptions since 2010.
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.'
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%.
The process of pitching your deck to many investors in sequence, iterating based on feedback. Like a miserable version of speed dating.
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.
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 speed at which a VC fund invests its committed capital. Deploy too fast and you look desperate; too slow and your LPs wonder if you can actually find deals.
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.
Rights allowing majority shareholders to force minority shareholders to join in selling the company. Corporate democracy's escape hatch, where your vote doesn't matter if enough people with more shares decide differently.
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.
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.
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.
To fundamentally alter an existing market or industry with a new approach. Every startup claims to 'disrupt' something, and 99% of them are just adding a mobile app to an existing business model.
An event where startup cohorts (usually from accelerators like Y Combinator) pitch to 500+ investors in rapid-fire succession—speed dating for capital.
Daily Active Users divided by Monthly Active Users, a metric expressing engagement where anything above 33% is considered respectable and anything below 10% is a sign of serious problems.
A situation where a startup with good metrics but bad unit economics keeps raising money from VCs who don't do the math. Also called 'raising on hope and a spreadsheet.'
Distributed to Paid-In Capital—the ratio showing how much cash a VC fund has returned to investors relative to what was invested, the only metric VCs care about more than founders' happiness.
A venture fund's multiple of return—how much capital investors have received back for every dollar they invested. The VC equivalent of 'Did we make money?'
How you get your product to customers—direct sales, self-serve, partnerships, affiliate networks, etc. Often the secret to success that founders ignore.
A PowerPoint presentation that explains why your startup will either revolutionize the world or disappear within 18 months, with no middle ground. VCs will judge your entire company in 60 seconds based on your first three slides.
The phase between term sheet and closing where investors suddenly realize they haven't actually verified anything and demand 10,000 documents.
A company that conducts business primarily on the internet, or the era of internet-based business ventures in the 1990s. The term comes from the ".com" domain suffix used by commercial websites.