Nobody Loses a Company Because They Did Not Know the Word. They Lose It Because They Did Not Ask.

I used to think startup vocabulary was an onboarding problem. Something you hand a new intern in week one and forget about.

I was wrong. It is not an onboarding problem. It is an access problem, and it runs much deeper than I expected. I have watched a founder sign a term sheet without understanding what a liquidation preference does to their own payout. I have watched an operator accept equity instead of salary for two years without ever asking what percentage of what, or at what valuation.

I have watched people with genuinely good businesses decide they were "not a startup" because they had never heard the word bootstrapping used approvingly. I have watched talented people sit silently in rooms where a single question would have changed their next five years. None of them lacked intelligence. They lacked twelve words.

What we built

A single interactive glossary. 100 terms across five areas that overlap constantly in real work:

• Venture capital and funding

• Startup building and metrics

• Ecosystem building

• AI and technology

• Team and interpersonal communication

Every term carries four things:

1. A plain English definition. No jargon explaining jargon.

2. An analogy. Dilution is your slice of pizza getting thinner when the pizza is cut into more slices. A moat is water around the castle, not a taller flag on the roof. Runway is how much road is left before the plane has to be airborne.

3. A one-phrase example. How the word actually gets used, not how a dictionary would use it.

4. Synonyms. Because the same idea has three names depending on who is in the room.

Three modes: browse and search, flashcards you flip, and a quiz that gives you a definition and asks you to name the term. One HTML file. No login, no install, no account.

Why the analogy matters more than the definition

If I could keep only one field, I would keep the analogy.

A definition tells you what a word means. An analogy tells you why the word exists, and that is what lets you use it. Once you understand a moat as water around a castle, you can look at a company and judge whether it has one. Once you understand runway as road left before takeoff, you understand why a founder with nine months of cash is already raising and not relaxing.

That is the line between knowing vocabulary and thinking with it. Knowing it gets you through the meeting. Thinking with it gets you into the decision.

Who this is actually for

I built it for our interns. Then I watched founders use it. Then operators, then a couple of people who have been in this industry longer than I have and quietly checked what carry actually means.

So: anyone who has nodded along in a meeting and looked something up afterwards. Anyone about to sign something they have read four times. Anyone who suspects the barrier in front of them is smaller than it looks.

It is smaller than it looks. It is about a hundred words wide.

The part that keeps going

The glossary is not the product. The feedback loop is.

Every time someone tells us which term tripped them up, it goes on the list. The term list sits in one array at the top of the file, so anyone can add to it without touching anything else. The people who felt the gap most recently are the best people to close it.

Lowering barriers to entry is most of what ecosystem building actually is. We usually aim that at capital, networks, and market access, because those are the barriers that look serious. But the cheapest barrier to remove is a word somebody was too uncomfortable to ask about.