The Startup World Never Speaks Plainly, So We Tried to Translate What It Actually Means

This course comes in three parts: the beginner's vocabulary book, the advanced urban dictionary, and reading comprehension.

Steve Jobs's commencement speech at Stanford made "Stay hungry, stay foolish" famous.

In recent years, corporate core values with that same philosophical air have multiplied out of control. So has a whole pile of startup-adjacent terms — "new retail," "the second half" — that sound plausible and familiar without ever being clear. They tend to sound sophisticated and intimidating. To an ordinary person with no industry knowledge, this jargon can seem overly technical; read a tech story that uses it with no context or explanation and you often can't follow it.

For many startups, of course, raising money depends not only on the product but on how well you tell a story at the pitch. In front of investors, a concept nobody has ever heard of can matter as much as a complete business model. And for founders themselves, speaking the industry's jargon may make it easier to build an identity around "I am changing the world."

But when the startup world leans too hard on its own language, it may lose the ability to explain an idea to an outsider without it.

An earlier Quartz report noted that many founders at startup conferences, asked what their companies actually do, can only stack up buzzwords — they can't say it plainly —

A watch company that makes customizable watch faces, for instance, is very good at calling itself "a disruptive consumer brand delivering a platform for cutting-edge customization technology and original content."

Beyond this upmarket vagueness, a lot of these concepts aren't really all that innovative either.

"Right now everyone loves to say their business has something to do with 'the cloud' when they're promoting themselves — what it really means is 'our business is on the internet,'" said Casey Lau, an organizer of startup competitions. "But once founders drag the word 'cloud' into it, it suddenly sounds professional, grand, expensive and full of promise."

Startup jargon is loud and hard to follow, and at the same time carries a dubious whiff of fashion. The combination is confusing.

So, to get a better handle on what the startup world is actually saying — in the spirit of curiosity, and of puncturing clichés — we've tried to translate some of these insider terms into plain language for you. Most come out of Silicon Valley culture, and they cover technology, finance, corporate management and more.

Common Startup Jargon: The Insider's Vocabulary Book

1. Corporate Culture

Original meaning: Cultural phenomena such as a company's values and way of doing things.

What it actually means: Something like a personal signature line or a bio — the kind of thing you have to rewrite every few years.

2. Disruptive

Original meaning: A term coined by Clayton Christensen, used mostly for technology that offers new functions, expands and opens new markets, or destroys existing ones.

What it actually means: A mainstream startup-world value that has been badly inflated. Its trademark move is seeing the large in the small: a phone gaining one more color option is the first step toward changing the entire industry's aesthetic. That powerful knack for reading grand meaning into tiny details has given us a disruptive new understanding of the word "disruptive."

3. "xxx is the new xxx"

Original meaning: Breaking out of existing patterns of thought to improve something or create something new.

What it actually means: More innovative than creating something new is filling in the blanks of a fixed formula — "small is the new big," "pink is the new black" — a word game, an incantation that turns lead into gold.

4. Fengkou, or "Standing Where the Wind Blows"

Original meaning: Coined by the well-known English enthusiast Lei Jun, it refers to a hot topic or industry an entrepreneur can ride.

What it actually means: Out of a longing for the kind of success that soars straight up, people gave the word "opportunity" a new name. But Waiting for the Wind and Creating the Wind remain the leading works on the subject, and the documentary literature in the same field runs mostly to disaster epics: Hong Kong hoists Typhoon Signal No. 8, the whole city shuts down for the day, and anyone still outdoors trying to fly into the wind gets slapped into the South China Sea.

5. Incubator

Original meaning: An economic organization that provides early-stage companies with the infrastructure and services they need to grow.

What it actually means: What looks like a patron offering startups technical and financial support is in fact in the business of group-renting office space — HR and admin rolled into one, solving the problem of a startup's overly flat structure. But now that the cost of starting a company keeps falling, chain coffee shops and boutique cafés have become the base camps of entrepreneurship, forming a new incubation supply chain.

6. Bootstrapping

Original meaning: A type of entrepreneurship funded mainly by personal assets or operating revenue, without outside investment.

What it actually means: The high-minded, ask-no-one-for-help kind of entrepreneurship, paid for out of your own savings — usually because you couldn't find an investor. The fundraising channels are personal savings, plus calling on family and friends the way an insurance salesman does.

7. Lean Startup

Original meaning: A business model proposed by Eric Ries, which advocates using the simplest workable product to run business experiments and lower the risk and cost of failure.

What it actually means: Like a copywriter turning in the outline first, so it hurts less when the thing gets killed.

8. Content Entrepreneurship

Original meaning: A fengkou of the internet era.

What it actually means: The cheapest way to handle a midlife crisis is probably to start a WeChat official account.

9. Serial Entrepreneur

Original meaning: The founder of more than one startup.

What it actually means: A serial (failed) entrepreneur. The fastest way to start your second company is to let the first one go under.

10. The One-Dollar Millionaire

Original meaning: Executives who say their annual salary is one dollar.

What it actually means: As the person with the highest net worth and the lowest salary in the company, the truth behind the volunteer labor is tax avoidance — staying true to the original aspiration by spending money where it counts.

11. VP

Original meaning: Vice president, a senior manager ranked above department heads and below the CEO.

What it actually means: The career ceiling for a lot of people, and the group worst hit by title inflation — roughly a third of the people in the Lujiazui subway station are VPs.

12. Product Manager

Original meaning: PM for short, a hard-to-define role, the person responsible for a product's entire life cycle.

What it actually means: Remember the entry above? The other two-thirds of the people in that subway station are product managers.

13. MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Original meaning: In product development, an early demo showing only a product's core concept and functions.

What it actually means: The minimum viable product — the starting template, and the study object, of the "if it doesn't work we'll just tweak it" school of product managers.

14. Slack

Original meaning: A platform for internal communication and collaboration inside a company.

What it actually means: Silicon Valley's enterprise WeChat. With big group chats running in several rooms all day, mute and block are the two features users know best.

15. Startup Conference

Original meaning: An expo-style event with exhibitions and talks where founders and attendees can meet.

What it actually means: A talent show for the startup world, usually in two rounds: an open audition laid out like a craft fair, then a performance by whoever gets through.

16. Pivot

Original meaning: Adjusting a product's or a company's overall strategy in response to market feedback.

What it actually means: The self-consolation that "if the mountain won't turn, the water will" — the last struggle of a company on the edge of collapse. Few post-mortem reviews bring one back to life; mostly they are the warm-up act for announcing that the startup has failed.

17. Ramen Profitable

Original meaning: A startup whose profits are just enough to cover the founder's basic living expenses.

What it actually means: What you earn is only enough for ramen. Shin Ramyun, to be exact.

These days founders are all straining to cross into new fields, and in linguistic terms that effort shows up as a side business in coining words. A new world is hard to build; a new word comes out of your mouth for free. In English-speaking countries the upgraded jargon tends to swap letters or words around and hunt for puns. The jargon invented in China has more imagination — a single term will carry an entire worldview on its back. Take the endlessly repeated word "ecosystem," which can't help but bring to mind the spirit of Yuan Longping, China's hybrid-rice scientist, taking possession of the speaker.

Upgraded Startup Jargon: Wannabe Oxford Dictionary Entries

1. Vest in Peace

Original meaning: While waiting for stock options to vest, a work attitude of "I will create just enough value not to be fired." Adapted from "rest in peace."

What it actually means: Coasting.

2. BHAG

Original meaning: Big hairy audacious goal — a corporate vision that stresses strategy and execution over sentiment.

What it actually means: Our goal is to set a goal nobody can understand.

3. Brogrammer

Original meaning: Bro plus programmer — the gym-going, socially fluent male programmer.

What it actually means: A not-especially-popular programmer who feels he stands head and shoulders above the rest.

4. Ecosystem Chemical Reaction

Original meaning: Coined by Jia Yueting, meaning roughly "an ecosystem chemical fusion reaction."

What it actually means: Google's ecosystem runs on software, Apple's runs on hardware, LeEco's runs on creative writing.

5. Sprinting Blindfolded

Original meaning: A fearless spirit of "charging ahead without hesitation, even into total ruin."

What it actually means: The world goes east, we go west, bravely squandering our investors' money.

6. The Second Half of the Internet

Original meaning: The disappearance of the mobile internet's traffic windfall, with user growth and time spent going flat.

What it actually means: Another way of saying "don't keep telling me I've made no progress — the whole economy is bad right now."

7. The Internet's Next Act

Original meaning: There is no second half of the internet; the next chance to become a unicorn is artificial intelligence.

What it actually means: The internet page should have been turned long ago. We happen to be researching AI ourselves, or to have invested in a pile of companies that are — so we may as well start shouting early and set up the jokes for our next product launch.

8. New Retail

Original meaning: A broad retail form that fuses online and offline using algorithms, artificial intelligence, data and other technology.

What it actually means: You can buy things with your phone anywhere. In order to sell things to you, we take responsibility for collecting your personal information, but we don't plan to take responsibility for protecting it. Thanks.

9. Gross National Time

Original meaning: Coined by Luo Zhenyu: business competition is shifting from the dimension of space to the dimension of time, and what companies fight over is not some rival product but the user's limited hours.

What it actually means: Business models built on learning in scraps of spare time will only do better and better. Here is a book we have chewed for you — click the link to subscribe to the Luoji Siwei reading bundle, and pay for the illusion that you have already read it.

10. Techfin

Original meaning: Unlike fintech, Jack Ma stressed, a Techfin company puts the emphasis on technology, using technology to reshape finance.

What it actually means: There's a big difference between first author and second author. Don't mix them up.

11. Mindshare

Original meaning: In the competition around consumption upgrading, making sure that when a user thinks of a product category, your brand or product comes to mind first.

What it actually means: If all else fails, open a new file — get there by inventing a whole new category, like "light meals."

As you work your way up through internet jargon, memorizing the words without knowing how to use them lands you in the same small trap as any other language: in the reading-comprehension section you recognize every character and still have no idea what the passage says. So that you can put it to use, we've supplied some of the jargon with a context. Here's what a day of startup-world conversation sounds like.

A Day of Startup-World Conversation: With Some Rousing Slogans

1. "A year into starting my own company, I think it's time to try a first round of friends-and-family financing."

Original meaning: "The company just turned one! Time to start thinking about fundraising."

What it actually means: "If I can't borrow money from relatives and friends, the company lasts until next Wednesday at the latest."

2. "Our goal is to join the 'Three Comma Club' someday!"

Original meaning: "$1,000,000,000 is separated by three commas; three commas is a coy way of saying the billionaires' club."

What it actually means: "'Someday we'll be rich' has about the same odds as 'let's have dinner sometime.'"

3. "Our demo day is next week, and two directors from XX Fund are coming!"

Original meaning: "Demo day is usually an event an incubator holds for the startups it incubates, a sort of showcase of results, open to the media, investors and other people in the industry."

What it actually means: "A pre-emptive warning before the open class, reminding colleagues who are normally in permanent gloom mode: please, everyone, don't be too much yourselves today."

4. "Based on user feedback, we've decided to pivot and look for other markets."

Original meaning: "We are a company that keeps experimenting to improve the product and cares about user experience."

What it actually means: "Having basically no users made us realize the product isn't very good, so we're forcing one last rescue attempt before we go under."

5. "I ran a sample survey of user pain points. Compared with aspirin, our product is probably more like a vitamin."

Original meaning: "Aspirin relieves pain and saves lives; a vitamin, by comparison, lacks that irreplaceable quality."

What it actually means: "Our product is dispensable."

6. "Make the world a better place"

Original meaning: "A lovely vision of making life better."

What it actually means: "A contagious, late-stage case of tech-world delusions of grandeur, the compulsion to always be changing the world."

7. "Our business model is lean startup, and our business condition is intensely hungry for growth."

Original meaning: "We are a brave, smart company that doesn't mess around."

What it actually means: "If we had enough money, we'd like to make a complete product too, and eat our fill instead of being hungry."

8. "What's so cool about a unicorn? A decacorn — that's cool."

Original meaning: "More and more startups are now valued above one billion US dollars, so the word 'unicorn' doesn't carry the weight it used to."

What it actually means: "Sour grapes. Since we're never going to be a unicorn anyway, we may as well stand at the top of the pecking order and insult it."

9. "A younger schoolmate of mine is really interested in our company. Great background, solid technical skills, well worth a referral — when do you have time to interview her?"

Original meaning: "To help the company grow and make hiring more efficient, I'm doing a fine job of promoting our internal referral program."

What it actually means: "I've never actually met this schoolmate, who took five years to graduate. She found me on LinkedIn herself. She'd be in a different department anyway, so she can't cause me any trouble, and I'm referring her purely for the bonus."

Given the speed at which the startup world manufactures new species, we can't promise on the strength of the translations above that you'll "learn it guaranteed, or your money back." If this hard-to-parse language has stirred a faint interest in you, try a proper online dictionary of Silicon Valley jargon such as SVD, which will make an insider of you fast, or a book by a former Silicon Valley founder called Valley Speaks, and see how someone who's been there mocks the daily flow of hot air.

But if people inside and outside the industry both have to hold a dictionary to understand this jargon, communication gets a great deal more expensive — and you get the pile-up where, stripped of the jargon, someone can no longer say what they mean.

Set against all the startups that redefine the world by inventing words, Uber's founder offered a touching template for describing his own company: "You do X and Y happens." Uber's early product description, for instance, was: "Push a button, and five minutes later a Mercedes comes to pick you up." The formula may not suit every company, but its plainness is worth borrowing. And if you happen to be mulling over this business of starting a company, maybe consider it — talk more like a human, and pull fewer stunts.

Cover image: Unsplash, The Social Network; illustrations by: Lin Xiaoyao