How To Speak Startup, Part Deux

Given the massive influx of capital that we are currently enduring in Silicon Valley, TechCrunch has decided to take another crack at the lexicon of the moment to help everyone understand just what people mean when they say things that make you want to snag them by the hair and give them a noogie.

Following our previous entry, this list is an expansion — we are here to help, after all. If you disagree with one of our definitions, please do the following: Take your headphones off, quietly leave the building, find the bay, throw your phone into it, and then stick your head in the sand.

We love you too1. Here we go:

“We Do Things that Don’t Scale” – We host lots of expensive “launch parties” in various cities, mostly so we can spend time catching up with our friends who aren’t good enough to work in The Valley and expense it to our angel investors. We have also read Paul Graham’s most popular essays.

Cloud — The Internet.

A Brunch – n. A collection of post-Series A startup employees.

$4 Toast – Now $5.

Hacker House – A homeless shelter for nerds.

Series B — What you will not raise.

“We are rapidly iterating” – ”We are making successive decisions about our product that assume less and less with each cycle, until…”

“We are pivoting” – “Yeah so at this point we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing, but we’ll be damned if we have to return unspent capital to our investors. Fail early and often, right?”

Twitter’s user growth — [Definition missing]

“We’ll have a beta ready by October.” – Check back in the New Year.

Cap Table — Thing that your CEO doesn’t really understand, but promises is in good shape.

Term Sheet – The pieces of paper which might potentially bind you to an OPM dealer. [See previously: OPM, abbr. “Other People’s Money”]

YC Fellows Program – Proof that the first taste of OPM is free.

Startup – That project you’ve kind of been working on with some of your friends, which you mostly use as a vehicle for your fantasies of becoming Zuck-scale wealthy. (Spoiler alert: those fantasies are just as achievable as your startup idea is feasible.)

Unicorn — As if metaphors in Silicon Valley couldn’t get more childish.

Uber — What you are not the next of.

“We’re the Uber for X” — We have bad unit economics and are proud of it.

Lift — What your startup doesn’t have.

“We have lots of unstructured big data.” — We have a big pile of shit in a bucket.

Sam Altman — The person you want to know, you claim that you know, you don’t know, and your friends know that you don’t know. They are being polite.

CES — The only reason anyone ever went to a Qualcomm presser.

“We have a keg in the office” — Our CEO is a raging alcoholic and is desperate for some reason to start drinking. See also: Morning kombucha.

Office dog — The reason why no one got shit done today.

TechCrunch — Something that is still alive, against all odds.

PR Agency — A pyramid scheme by another name.

Marlowe — The place where people who think that Marlowe is cool try to impress people who know that Marlowe isn’t cool. You’ll still eat the burger though, because it’s almost as good as the chicken sandwich. Also, great bar staff. (Please don’t ban us, we need fries.)

The comments are yours, Let loose hell, friends, for we have the August Capital party to head to shortly.

1. Jason wrote all the shitty ones.