Startups Glossary

Browse 64 startups terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

64 Startups Terms

Acquihire
An acquisition done primarily to hire a startup's team rather than to keep its product or revenue stream. The product may be shut down while the talent is...
Advisory Board
A group of advisors who provide strategic guidance, introductions, or expertise to a company without having the formal authority of a board of directors. In...
AI First
Describing a company, product, or strategy that treats AI as the default or central design principle rather than as an add-on feature. In practice, the term...
AI Moat
A durable competitive advantage in AI, often claimed to come from proprietary data, distribution, infrastructure, or product integration rather than just model...
AI Startup
A startup whose main product, infrastructure, or market positioning depends heavily on artificial intelligence. The label covers everything from model labs to...
Blockchain Startup
A startup whose product, infrastructure, or fundraising story is built substantially around blockchain technology, tokens, or decentralized systems. The label...
Bootstrapped
Built and grown primarily without outside institutional investment, usually through founder capital and customer revenue. Bootstrapped companies often trade...
Brogrammer
A pejorative label for a programmer associated with hyper-masculine, frat-like startup culture, often emphasizing bravado, exclusionary behavior, and status...
Cash Burn
The rate at which a company is spending more cash than it brings in, usually measured monthly. Cash burn is one of the clearest signals of how much runway...
Competitive Advantage
A meaningful edge that makes an organization harder to outcompete, such as better distribution, lower cost, stronger product fit, proprietary data, or unusual...
Co-Working
Working from a shared workspace used by people from different companies, freelance roles, or remote teams. In startup and remote culture, co-working is often...
Crypto Startup
A startup built around cryptocurrency, blockchain infrastructure, token-based products, or adjacent financial primitives. The label spans serious...
Customer Development
A startup methodology centered on talking to customers early and often to validate problems, buyers, and product direction before scaling execution. It is...
Customer Discovery
The process of interviewing and studying potential customers to understand their problems, workflows, priorities, and willingness to pay before committing to a...
Death Valley
A dangerous period where a startup has not yet reached sustainable traction or financing stability but is already consuming significant resources. It is...
Dev Tool Startup
A startup whose product is primarily for developers, engineering teams, or technical workflows, such as CI, observability, infrastructure, or coding tools....
Dotcom
A shorthand term for internet-era companies, especially those associated with the dot-com boom and bust around the turn of the century. In culture, dotcom...
dot-com bubble
The speculative frenzy in internet-related stocks from roughly 1995 to 2001, during which companies with no revenue and dubious business models reached...
Dot-Com Crash
The collapse of many internet companies around the early 2000s after the dot-com bubble burst, now used as a cautionary reference in tech cycles.
Early Stage
Describing companies that are still in the formative phase of validating product, customers, team, and business model, often before significant scale. The...
Elevator Pitch Culture
A culture that strongly values being able to explain products, ideas, and roles in a short, polished, high-impact way. This can sharpen clarity, but it can...
Entrepreneur
A person who starts and builds a business venture, usually by taking on uncertainty around product, market, and execution. In startup culture the term carries...
Fail Fast Culture
A culture that encourages trying ideas quickly, learning early, and not overinvesting in failing approaches before evidence arrives. In practice, fail-fast...
Fintech
A broad category covering technology-enabled financial services such as payments, lending, banking, investing, insurance, and financial infrastructure. Fintech...
Founder Culture
The strong influence founders have on a startup's tone, decision-making style, risk appetite, and internal norms. Founder culture can create clarity and...
Founder Market Fit
The degree to which a founder's experience, insight, network, or motivation makes them unusually well suited to solve a specific market problem. Investors...
Founding Engineer
One of the earliest engineers at a startup, often expected to do broad high-impact work across product, infrastructure, hiring, and process. In startup culture...
Founding Team
The small group that started the company and shaped its earliest product, culture, and strategy. The strength and cohesion of the founding team often...
Full Stack Panic
The stressed feeling that comes from being responsible for every layer of a system at once, from UI to infrastructure to production support. It is common in...
Full-Stack Startup
A startup that controls multiple layers of the stack, often combining software with operations, hardware, services, or financing rather than focusing on just...
Funding Culture
The habits and values an organization or ecosystem develops around raising, spending, and talking about funding. In startup culture, funding culture shapes...
Ground Floor
The earliest stage of an opportunity, when a company, product, or project is just getting started and upside may be greatest. Joining on the ground floor...
Growth Culture
A culture strongly oriented toward growth in users, revenue, reach, or influence, often with experimentation and speed emphasized heavily. Growth culture can...
Growth Stage
The phase of a company after initial validation, when the focus shifts toward scaling revenue, teams, and systems in a repeatable way. Growth-stage companies...
Hacker House
A shared living or event space where hackers, founders, or builders gather to work intensely, network, and collaborate.
Hack It Till You Make It
A playful variation on 'fake it till you make it' that celebrates scrappy prototyping, rough implementation, and sheer momentum while a product or project is...
High-Growth
Describing a company or market expanding at a notably fast rate, often attracting investor attention and operational strain at the same time. High-growth...
Hypergrowth
An extreme phase of rapid company expansion across revenue, headcount, and operations, often faster than internal systems can comfortably support. Hypergrowth...
Lean Canvas
A one-page planning framework adapted for startups that emphasizes problem, solution, key metrics, unfair advantage, and customer segments. It is designed to...
Minimum Viable Team
The smallest team structure that can realistically deliver and operate a product or project without collapsing under dependencies.
Moonshot
An extremely ambitious high-risk project aimed at a breakthrough rather than an incremental gain. The word implies both scale of vision and low odds of easy...
Move Fast
A cultural push toward rapid execution, short feedback loops, and willingness to accept some messiness in exchange for speed. Depending on how it is applied,...
Move Fast and Break Things
A startup-era slogan associated with Facebook that celebrated rapid iteration and risk tolerance, even if some failures occurred along the way. It later became...
Over-Capitalized
Having raised more capital than the business can deploy effectively at its current stage, often creating pressure to spend ahead of product-market fit or...
Paper Napkin Architecture
A rough system design sketched quickly and informally, often enough to align a team before heavier documentation exists.
Portfolio Company
A company that has received investment from a venture fund, private equity firm, or similar investor and is therefore part of that investor's portfolio. The...
Rapid Growth
A phase where users, revenue, or operations are expanding quickly enough to strain existing systems and assumptions. Rapid growth is exciting, but it often...
SaaS Bro
A mocking label for a stereotypical software-as-a-service operator or salesperson associated with aggressive growth talk, KPI obsession, and formulaic startup...
Scrappy
Resourceful and effective despite limited money, time, or formal structure. In startup culture, calling a team scrappy is usually praise for practical...
Ship or Die
A harsh culture slogan implying that constant shipping is existentially necessary and anything that slows release is a threat. It captures deadline pressure...
Silicon Valley
The California region historically associated with semiconductor companies, startups, venture capital, and the global technology industry. In broader usage it...
Solo Developer
A developer who builds and often maintains an application, tool, or business largely alone, handling product, code, deployment, and support themselves. The...
Startup Accelerator
A program that gives early-stage startups mentorship, network access, limited funding, and a fixed-duration growth structure, often ending in a demo day....
Startup Culture
The mix of speed, ambiguity, role fluidity, resource constraints, and growth pressure commonly associated with early-stage companies. The phrase can refer to...
Startup Ecosystem
The network of founders, investors, accelerators, service providers, employees, events, and institutions that support startup creation in a region or sector. A...
Startup Graveyard
A figurative collection of failed startups, dead products, or abandoned companies used as a reminder of how many ventures do not survive. The term is often...
Startup Incubator
An organization that supports very early companies with workspace, mentorship, resources, and sometimes capital over a longer or less standardized period than...
Survivor Bias Tech
The mistake of learning mainly from visible tech winners while ignoring the many similar efforts that failed.
Tech Bro Culture
A critical label for a style of tech-industry behavior associated with macho posturing, shallow contrarianism, growth-at-all-costs attitudes, and exclusionary...
Tech Crunch
A reference to TechCrunch, the startup and technology news publication known for covering funding rounds, product launches, acquisitions, and founder...
Tech Unicorn
A private technology startup valued at one billion dollars or more. The term reflects both startup aspiration and the venture-capital tendency to treat...
Unicorn Club
A casual phrase for the set of startups that have crossed the one-billion-dollar private valuation threshold. It reflects how venture culture turns valuation...
Venture Capital
A form of private investment capital used to back startups and other high-growth private companies in exchange for equity. Venture capital expects a small...
Y Combinator
One of the most influential startup accelerators, known for funding early-stage companies, running batch programs, and shaping founder culture through advice,...

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