Due diligence is the investigation an investor runs on a startup between term sheet and closing to verify claims and surface hidden risks. The scope covers business, financial, legal, and technical risk before any money is wired. It is what turns a non-binding term sheet into a closed deal, and it is also the phase where most deals that fall apart fall apart.
A standard early-stage diligence package covers commercial diligence (market size, competition, customer references, pipeline), financial diligence (cap table accuracy, historical and projected financials, runway, burn), legal diligence (incorporation documents, IP assignment from every founder and contractor, employment agreements, prior financing documents, any litigati...
A quarterly business review (QBR) is the recurring strategic review at quarter-end covering OKR achievement, strategic initiative progress, trends, lessons learned, and next-quarter planning. Typically a full-day or multi-day session, it's the strategic equivalent of monthly business reviews (tactical financial) and weekly business reviews (tactical execution), and is distinct from "customer QBRs" (customer success meetings with key accounts) despite the shared acronym. It is the leadership rhythm that closes each quarter and opens the next.
The standard internal QBR structure (1-2 days):
Quarter review (half-day):
A startup is a young company built to find and scale a repeatable, high-growth business model under conditions of high uncertainty. It is distinguished from a traditional small business by its pursuit of rapid growth rather than steady-state operation, defined by what it is searching for (a working, scalable model) rather than by its age, size, or industry.
The two most-cited definitions come from the founders of the modern startup playbook. Steve Blank: "A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model." Paul Graham of Y Combinator: "A startup is a company designed to grow fast." Both definitions point to the same idea, that the defining feature of a startup is the search for and...
Reward-based crowdfunding is the model where backers receive a product, perk, or experience in exchange for their pledge rather than equity. It is distinct from equity crowdfunding (the model used by Wefunder and Republic under Reg CF, where backers receive shares) and donation-based crowdfunding (where backers receive nothing). It is exemplified by Kickstarter and Indiegogo and most commonly used for consumer products, creative projects, tabletop games, books, and other tangible-deliverable categories. The model functions structurally as a pre-order with bonus tiers and community marketing wrapped together.
The mechanic: project creator sets reward tiers at various pledge amounts. A $25 pledge might get the basic ...
A marketing funnel is the staged model of how a person moves from first awareness of a product to a paying, retained, and referring customer. It is used to organize marketing tactics and performance metrics by stage rather than by channel. It is a diagnostic frame for finding where customers drop off, not a literal description of how any individual customer thinks.
Classic funnels work top to bottom: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Retention, Advocacy (a modernized version of AIDA, Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action, from 1898). Tech-flavored variants include AARRR / Pirate Metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) and Reforge's loop-oriented variant. The reason there are multiple frames is that...
Kanban is an agile method that visualizes work on a WIP-limited board to expose bottlenecks, treating work as a continuous stream rather than time-boxed sprints. Columns typically run To Do, In Progress, Done, with refinements like Code Review, QA, and Deploying inserted as needed. It originated in Toyota's manufacturing system in the 1940s (Taiichi Ohno) and was adapted to software by David J. Anderson in the 2000s (Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, 2010). It is the most-used agile method outside Scrum and a natural fit for teams whose work doesn't break cleanly into sprint-sized chunks.
The four core practices: visualize the work (a board, physical or digital, shows every item and what state it's ...
A friends and family round is the earliest informal funding stage where founders raise from their personal network at pre-seed amounts. Sometimes called an "F&F round" or "love money round," it covers parents, siblings, college friends, former colleagues, mentors, and extended family, typically $10,000 to $250,000 total across 3 to 15 individuals. The capital funds initial company formation, MVP development, and first few months of operations before the company is ready to approach professional investors. It is one of the most-common funding sources for first-time founders and one of the most-emotionally-loaded because the relationships at stake aren't transactional.
The typical structure: check sizes of $5K-$50K pe...
A Confidential Information Memorandum (CIM) is the detailed document an investment bank prepares for an M&A process so buyers have what they need to bid. Also called an Offering Memorandum, IM, or Information Memorandum, the CIM typically runs 30 to 80 pages and is prepared by an investment bank or M&A advisor on behalf of a selling company, providing prospective buyers with the substantive business, financial, market, operational, and team information they need to evaluate the company and submit an initial bid. It is distributed after a buyer signs an NDA and indicates serious interest, and is the central marketing document in an M&A process.
The standard structure of a CIM: executive summary (5 to 10 pa...
Startups fail primarily because they build products the market doesn't want, run out of cash, or hit unrecoverable conflict among the founding team. According to CB Insights' ongoing analysis of hundreds of startup post-mortems, these are the top three causes (with the cash failure typically meaning before reaching profitability or the next round). Roughly 70 percent of venture-backed startups shut down or fail to return capital within their funding lifecycle, and survey-based long-term failure rates run closer to 90 percent.
CB Insights' "Top Reasons Startups Fail" report, drawn from founder post-mortems, has consistently ranked "no market need" as the most-cited cause of failure, appearing in roughly 35 to 42 percent of ...
A pivot is a structured course correction in product, customer, business model, or technology strategy in response to learning from the market. It is made deliberately rather than by drift, and aimed at preserving what's working while changing what's not. It was popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup (2011) and adopted as standard vocabulary across modern startup work. It is one of the most misused words in the founder lexicon because every change gets called a pivot regardless of whether it's actually structural.
Ries identified ten specific pivot types, each describing a different dimension of change: zoom-in (a single feature becomes the whole product), zoom-out (the original product becomes a single feature of a bigger one),...