TAM (total addressable market) is the total revenue opportunity if every potential customer in the world bought your product. SAM (serviceable addressable market) is the portion of TAM you can realistically reach given your product, geography, and channels. SOM (serviceable obtainable market) is the share of SAM you can capture, usually framed over 3 to 5 years. Investors use the three figures together to size the opportunity and to test whether a founder thinks rigorously about market.
There are two ways to calculate these numbers and only one of them earns trust. Top-down sizing starts from a published industry figure ("the global CRM market is $90 billion, we will capture 1 percent") and is almost always how founders inflate ...
Product management is the discipline of guiding a product from idea to market through ongoing iteration, sitting at the intersection of business, design, and engineering. It balances what's worth building (business), what users need (design), and what's possible to build (engineering). It is owned by a role (the product manager) responsible for the outcomes the product delivers rather than the outputs the team ships. It is one of the most over-titled and under-defined roles in modern tech, with the actual job varying widely by company stage and product type.
The canonical model, popularized by Marty Cagan in Inspired (first edition 2008, third 2017), describes product management as the three-legged stool of value (will cu...
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is revenue generated divided by advertising spend, expressed as a ratio (4:1) or a multiple ($4 for every $1 spent). It is used to evaluate the efficiency of paid campaigns at the channel, campaign, ad set, or creative level, and reported either on a same-day attribution basis or against a longer-tail cohort window. It is the headline number on most paid-acquisition dashboards and the most-misread metric in marketing finance.
The first thing to understand about ROAS is that it is a revenue ratio, not a profit ratio. ROI is profit-over-cost; ROAS is revenue-over-ad-cost and ignores cost of goods, fulfillment, payment fees, and every other margin component. A "4:1 ROAS" sounds great until you disco...
Layoffs (also called Reduction in Force or RIF) are involuntary terminations driven by business need rather than individual performance. Companies typically use them when reducing burn, shifting strategy, eliminating a division, or unable to sustain current headcount. Layoffs require careful planning, legal compliance (WARN Act for large layoffs), generous severance, and humane execution to avoid both legal exposure and lasting damage to remaining employees' morale. They're the worst part of running a company and almost always handled less well than founders intend.
The layoff decision:
Why companies lay off:
Cohort analysis is the practice of grouping users by a shared characteristic and tracking their behavior over time as a group. The shared characteristic is most often acquisition date, but also acquisition channel, plan tier, geography, or onboarding path. It is used to surface trends and inflection points that blended averages hide, and is the standard methodology underneath retention measurement, LTV calculations, and most credible product-market-fit assessments.
The canonical cohort chart is a triangle: rows are cohorts (e.g., users who signed up each week or month), columns are time periods since signup (Day 1, Day 7, Day 30, Month 3, Month 12), and each cell shows what percentage of that cohort was still active or payin...
A partnership is a US business entity owned by two or more people who agree to operate a business together. The variants are distinguished primarily by liability structure: general partnership (GP, all partners share full personal liability and equal management authority by default), limited partnership (LP, one or more general partners with full liability plus one or more limited partners with passive investment status and limited liability), and limited liability partnership (LLP, all partners get liability protection from each other's malpractice, primarily used by professional services firms). It is the structure most commonly used today by venture capital funds, law firms, accounting firms, and similar professional partners...
The option strike price is the fixed price per share at which a stock option can be exercised to acquire common stock. It is set at grant date and unchanged for the life of the option, required by IRC Section 409A to equal the fair market value of common stock at grant date (set by the most recent 409A valuation), with significant tax penalties for the recipient if granted below FMV. It is the structural anchor of every option grant and the variable that determines the eventual cash outlay and bargain element at exercise.
The strike-price mechanics:
An Employer of Record (EOR) is a third-party company that legally employs workers on a client's behalf in jurisdictions where the client has no entity. The EOR handles payroll, benefits administration, tax withholding, employment compliance, and statutory requirements while the client retains day-to-day management of the worker's tasks and projects. EORs are used most often by startups hiring international talent without forming entities in each country, and it is the legal mechanism that lets a Delaware C-corp hire engineers in Brazil, Germany, India, and Australia without forming subsidiaries in any of those countries.
The mechanic: the client company identifies and selects the candidate; the EOR signs the employment co...
Everything about raising capital, from the first SAFE to the IPO. This cluster covers every named stage (pre-seed through Series E+), the investor types (VC, CVC, angels, family offices, crossover funds, strategic vs financial), the fund mechanics that drive investor behavior (LPs, GPs, fund life, carried interest), the crowdfunding regulations and platforms, the round structures (up, down, flat, bridge, extension), and the closing mechanics that make deals real. 97 entries.
This is the most thoroughly covered cluster in the lexicon because fundraising decisions compound for years.
Series A funding is a startup's first major priced equity round, led by an institutional venture capital firm. It is raised to scale a business that has already proven product-market fit and is generating real, repeatable revenue. It sets a formal valuation for the company, brings the first institutional board member, and is the round where the company transitions from "we have early traction" to "we're a fundable growth-stage business."
The 2025 benchmarks (Carta and PitchBook):
| Metric | 2025 typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Round size | $10M-$15M | $15M-$25M for hot AI/deep-tech |
| Post-money valuation | $40M-$67M (median ~$50M) | Wide variance by sector |
| Pre-money valuation | $30M-$55M | After pool refresh |
| Founder dilution | 17-22% | Includin... |