Concepts

Glossary of all concepts in the knowledge base.

• product-market-fit — The degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand; the single most important startup milestone
• do-things-that-dont-scale — Founders must manually do unscalable work before scalable growth can take hold
• customer-development — Steve Blank’s methodology for discovering and validating customer needs
• execution — Turning ideas into results through focus and intensity; the CEO’s five jobs
• fundraising — Raising capital from investors; “the secret is to have a good company”
• hiring — Recruiting, evaluating, and retaining talent; “don’t compromise on quality”
• growth — User/revenue growth; existential metric for startups; “never lose momentum”
• lean-startup — Build-Measure-Learn methodology for validated learning and experimentation
• minimum-viable-product — The simplest experiment enabling maximum validated learning with minimum effort
• pivoting — Fundamental change in business strategy while retaining lessons; ~70% of successful startups pivot
• startup-failure-modes — Recurring patterns that kill startups: weak models (26%), cash burn (37%), no demand (12%)
• ideation — Finding startup ideas; “live in the future, then build what’s missing”; the Well vs Sitcom test
• go-to-market-strategy — How to reach customers; Leslie’s Compass framework; is your product bought or sold?
• business-models — How companies create and capture value; SaaS, marketplace, freemium, platform, advertising
• founder-psychology — Mental health, resilience, and the founder’s paradox; 87.7% experience mental health issues
• unit-economics — Per-unit revenues and costs (CAC, LTV, payback); must work for viability at scale
• company-culture — “Defined by who you hire, fire, and promote” — compounds over years like a religion
• competitive-strategy — “Competition is for losers” (Thiel); build a monopoly with 10x tech, network effects, scale, brand
• legal-foundations — Delaware C-Corp, SAFE notes, 83(b) elections, vesting schedules, essential early legal steps
• pricing-strategy — Value-based pricing, the 10-5-20 rule; charge early, charge more than you think
• scaling — When and how to scale post-PMF; Hoffman’s blitzscaling 5 stages; the scaling paradox
• network-effects — A product becomes more valuable as more people use it; types, asymptotes, and breakdown conditions
• founder-mode — Staying directly engaged across the org rather than delegating through layers; skip-level meetings, selective depth
• operations — Day-to-day systems that turn strategy into results; editing metaphor, barrels vs ammunition, delegation matrix
• bootstrapping — Building without external funding; Fried’s 37signals model; the contrarian alternative to VC
• startup-metrics — AARRR pirate metrics framework; vanity vs actionable metrics; one metric that matters
• wartime-peacetime-ceo — Two fundamentally different leadership modes; 17 contrasts; switching between them is the hardest skill
• distribution — How products reach customers; Thiel’s distribution spectrum; power law of channels; the dead zone
• pitching — Communicating your startup’s story; essential structure, investor/customer/recruit pitching, the anti-pitch
• product-development — The ongoing craft of building product; discovery vs delivery, 4 risks, empowered teams, product by stage
• exits-and-acquisitions — How startup journeys end; acquisition dynamics, IPO readiness, the bootstrap exit, when to say no
• board-management — Building and running a board; composition, meetings, good vs bad investors, wartime vs peacetime boards
• community-building — Building engaged communities as growth engines; 4 community types, 3-phase playbook, health metrics
• storytelling — The founder’s most versatile skill; story arc, audience-specific narratives, the one-line test, story as culture
• international-expansion — Taking a startup beyond its home market; 4 expansion strategies; localization spectrum; non-US founder guidance
• deep-tech-startups — Biotech, hardware, energy, aerospace; different timelines, MVPs, and funding; the Valley of Death; regulatory as moat
• regulatory-navigation — Regulation as obstacle or moat; sector-by-sector landscape; the Uber problem; engage don’t avoid
• product-led-growth — Product as primary growth driver; PLG flywheel, freemium economics, bottom-up enterprise wedge
• technical-decisions — Engineering choices that shape trajectory; ship fast, tech debt tradeoffs, the rewrite question, stack selection
• marketplace-dynamics — Two-sided platform mechanics; cold start problem, atomic networks, liquidity, take rates, 5-phase lifecycle
• moats — The 7 startup moats (network effects, switching costs, scale, brand, tech, regulatory, community); evaluation framework
• retention-and-churn — Why retention > acquisition; cohort curves, churn rate benchmarks, NRR, the churn playbook, the death spiral
• onboarding — The experience that turns signups into active users; the aha moment, time-to-value, 3 patterns, funnel metrics
• remote-teams — Building distributed teams; remote vs co-location tradeoffs, 4 models, tactical communication/meeting/culture advice
• focus — The most important founder discipline; Altman’s “focus and intensity”, Rabois’ editing, Seibel’s 90/10, the “hell yes or no” filter
• leverage — What multiplies output beyond personal effort; Naval’s 4 types (labor, capital, code, media); permissionless leverage
• user-acquisition — Gaining users through founder-led sales, the 3Ws framework, then scalable channels
• cofounder-dynamics — Choosing cofounders, equity splits, vesting schedules, and preventing breakups
• ai-evals — Systematically measuring whether AI features work; error analysis first, manual review beats automation
• ai-agents — Using AI agents as employees; solo founder agent stack, multi-agent orchestration, new management skills
• niche-selection — The discipline of narrowing aggressively; the naming test; beachhead strategy; why every successful company was a niche company first
• positioning — How your product is the best in the world at delivering something a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about (Dunford); upstream of messaging, branding, sales pitch
• jobs-to-be-done — People don’t buy products, they hire them to do a job (Christensen); the milkshake story, Four Forces of Progress, Job Story format, Switch Interview; upstream of positioning, niche, PMF, roadmap
• founder-led-sales — The discipline of the founder personally selling every early customer; not a phase, a learning apparatus; the concierge offer, discovery-first, disqualification, transition threshold
• decision-making — The meta-skill: Type 1 (irreversible) vs Type 2 (reversible) decisions, Bezos’s 70% rule, pre-mortems, reference classes, disagree & commit, pre-commitment devices, speed as a function of reversibility not importance
• growth-loops — The correct mental model for how companies grow (Balfour/Winters/Chen/Reforge); closed systems where output feeds back as input, creating compounding growth; 4 types (viral, content, paid, sales); 7 company deep-dives (Pinterest content-SEO, HubSpot content-to-customer, Figma collaboration, Notion template-community, Slack cross-org viral, Superhuman status-referral, AI data flywheel); Four Fits; flywheels vs loops (Collins); Cold Start connection