Entrepreneurs have created their own vocabulary. The Wall Street Journal recently posted some important terms that every startup professional should know:
Accelerator: A program that helps young startups refine their product and pitch themselves to investors, in exchange for a cut of equity. Example incubators include Y Combinator or Techstars.
Blueskying: Making optimistic promises, particularly to investors.
Brogrammer: Stereotypically, software developers come in two types: nerds and brogrammers. The former are usually introverted, while the latter are loud and outgoing.
Co-Working: Working out of a shared office space with other cash-strapped startups, on a per-seat basis, typically with free coffee, kitchens and pint pong tables. Companies rent desks or small workspaces to startups with large offices.
Customer Success Associate: A customer-service rep. at a startup.
Demo Day: The day when an incubator’s companies pitch to potential venture-capital investors.
DevOps: A DevOps engineer is a software developer who works with both the software-development and the operations teams at a company as they write, test, and roll out software.
Freemium: The free version of an app that also has a better, paid version.
Green Meadow: A market where no competitors exist.
Growth Hacker: Someone who thinks of clever ways for the company to grow.
Hockey Stick: A graph showing rapid adoption of a startup’s product.
MVP: The first commercially viable version of a software product. As in “Minimum viable product” Releasing an MVP sets the clock ticking, because investors and customers expect a better, bug-free version soon.
Next Level: The ultimate in startup compliments. This generation’s version of “far out” “switched on” or “rad”.
Ninja: A term of praise for a person’s skill.
PEBCAK: An acronym for “problems emerge between chair and keyboard” – a sardonic programmer term for what happens when users are too dumb to use software correctly.
Prezi: An app that creates digital slide presentations.
Pufferfish: Making a startup seem larger than it is. Among other tricks, startups have been known to decorate empty desks and to create elaborate voice-mail systems to make it seem like more people work there.
Slack: A team-measuring app popular with startups. Also, a verb meaning to message someone using the Slack app.
Space: The area of an industry where a company competes. For example: That startup plays in the food tech space.
Subprime Unicorn: A company formerly valued at more than a billion dollars, now fallen on hard times. Many companies that were once highly prized by investors are now worth much less, or are rumored to be so.
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