Elevator Pitch

Definition

A 30-second summary of your startup that you deliver to investors in elevators, coffee lines, and restraining-order-adjacent proximity. If you can't explain your company in the time it takes to ride an elevator, your company is either too complicated or the elevator is too fast.

Example Usage

"My elevator pitch is so refined that I once convinced a stranger to invest $50K between floors 3 and 7, only to realize he was just trying to get to the parking garage."

Related Terms

Advanced

loss ratio

The percentage of a VC fund's investments that return zero, typically 50-70% despite everyone's confident pitches. The number partners don't mention at LP meetings unless forced.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

platform value-add

Services and resources VC firms provide beyond capital, such as recruiting help, PR support, or customer introductions. Marketing speak that ranges from genuinely useful to completely fictional.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

Vesting

The process by which employees gradually earn their stock options over time, designed to keep people from taking the equity and running. It's a four-year golden handcuff that makes quitting feel like leaving money on the table, even when the money is imaginary.

🚀 Startup / VC

Intermediate

churn

The startup world's euphemism for customers abandoning ship, measured as the rate at which subscribers cancel or stop using your service. It's the metric that keeps SaaS founders up at night, because acquiring new customers is expensive but losing existing ones is devastating. High churn is basically your business slowly bleeding out, but with spreadsheets.

🚀 Startup / VC

Beginner

crowdfunding

The modern equivalent of passing the hat, except the hat is a slick website and you're asking thousands of strangers on the internet to fund your dream project, questionable invention, or potato salad. It's democratized investing meets collective optimism meets occasional fraud.

🚀 Startup / VC

Beginner

hockey stick growth

The mythical J-curve trajectory where metrics stay flat forever and then suddenly shoot straight up, resembling a hockey stick. Every founder claims this is coming; few actually achieve it.

🚀 Startup / VC

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