An advisor is an outside expert who provides part-time strategic guidance, introductions, or domain expertise to a startup in exchange for equity. The relationship is formalized in a short advisor agreement and distinct from board members (advisors have no fiduciary duty and no voting power), from investors (advisors are not buying equity), and from consultants (advisors are ongoing relationships paid in equity, not project work paid in cash). The role is the most common way founders extend their leadership reach in the first three to four years of a company.
The categories that matter: technical advisors (a senior engineer or domain expert who reviews architecture decisions or vouches for the founders to investors, typically 1 to 4...
An accredited investor is an individual or entity meeting SEC thresholds for income, net worth, or professional knowledge to participate in unregistered private securities offerings. For individuals: $200,000+ in annual income (or $300,000 with spouse) for the past 2 years with reasonable expectation of continuing, OR net worth exceeding $1 million excluding primary residence, OR specific professional certifications like Series 7, 65, or 82 added under the 2020 SEC rule expansion. The qualification covers most startup financings under Regulation D Rule 506(b) and 506(c). It is the SEC's regulatory gate that determines who can legally participate in [Startup Investment] through private securities, and one of the most-impo...
A liquidation waterfall is the calculation that determines how exit proceeds are distributed across preference stack, share classes, and option pools at exit. Exit proceeds include acquisition cash, public offering proceeds, and dissolution distributions. The waterfall is modeled as a series of "buckets" that fill in priority order until the proceeds are exhausted. It is the math that determines what each shareholder actually receives, and the analysis founders most consistently postpone until it's too late to change.
The waterfall fills in roughly this order: secured debt first (rare for venture-backed startups, but present if there's outstanding venture debt with collateral), then unsecured debt and trade obligations...
A compensation philosophy is the explicit framework a company uses to make pay decisions across hiring, performance, promotions, and ongoing compensation adjustments. It defines how the company positions itself in the market (top of market vs median vs below market), how cash and equity balance in total compensation, how geography is treated (single global pay scale vs location-adjusted), and how performance vs tenure influences pay over time. The philosophy is one of the most-impactful documents a company creates because it shapes who gets attracted, who stays, and how employees experience the company over time. It is a discipline that most early-stage startups skip and most growth-stage companies eventually have to...
A startup accelerator is a fixed-term, cohort-based program that provides funding, mentorship, and a structured curriculum in exchange for equity, ending in a demo day. It is designed to compress a startup's first 6 to 12 months of development into a focused 3-month sprint, providing access to a network of investors and a culminating demo day where the cohort pitches.
The model was created by Y Combinator (founded by Paul Graham in 2005), which set the template most other accelerators have copied. The standard structure is a 3-month program, a small investment (Y Combinator currently invests $500,000 on standard SAFE terms in exchange for 7 percent of the company), weekly office hours with partners, group dinners, and a ...
Strategic planning is the systematic process of defining a company's long-term direction, choices, resource allocation, and execution priorities. It's typically conducted at multiple cadences (annual for long-term direction, quarterly for tactical execution, ad-hoc for major decisions), with the discipline varying significantly by company stage. Early-stage startups do minimal formal planning (founders adjust strategy frequently based on market feedback), growth-stage requires more deliberate processes (cross-functional alignment matters more), and mature companies have institutionalized planning processes (annual strategy refreshes, quarterly OKR cycles, monthly business reviews). It is the meta-process that organizes al...
The VP of Engineering (VP-E) is the senior executive responsible for engineering organization leadership, team management, delivery operations, and engineering culture. Sometimes called Head of Engineering, Director of Engineering, or Engineering Manager at smaller scale. The VP-E owns performance management, hiring and onboarding for engineering roles, and ensuring the engineering team delivers product effectively against business requirements. The role typically becomes necessary when the engineering team grows past 8-15 engineers and a single technical leader (often the founder CTO) can no longer effectively manage all engineering people-management responsibilities while also doing technical leadership work. It is the oper...
Runway is the number of months a startup can operate before running out of cash, calculated as cash on hand divided by monthly net burn. Founders track it monthly (or weekly when cash gets tight), and it is the single most-watched financial metric at an early-stage startup. It is the calendar that determines every other decision: when to raise, when to hire, when to cut, when to push, when to pivot. Running out of runway is the proximate cause behind most stories in [Why Startups Fail].
The math:
Runway (months) = Cash on hand ÷ Monthly net burn
A company with $2M in the bank and $100K/month net burn has 20 months of runway. The same company at $200K/month net burn has 10 months. Doubling burn halves the calendar.
Use net burn (cash ...
Growth hacking is the experimental discipline of using non-obvious, leverage-driven tactics to drive rapid user or revenue growth, coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. It combines marketing, product, engineering, and data, often by exploiting existing platforms, distribution loops, or product mechanics rather than by spending on traditional advertising. It is the experimental, scrappy ancestor of modern growth marketing, and the term has been so over-claimed that the original meaning is nearly buried.
The canonical historical examples define what growth hacking actually was. Hotmail appended "PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail" to every outgoing message in 1996 and went from zero to 12 million users in 18 months. Airbnb ...
GPU cost is the underlying compute cost of training and running AI models, dominated by Nvidia's H100, H200, B200, and B300 chips at $25,000-$50,000 each. GPU availability and cost are the limiting factor for AI training because foundation model labs need thousands of GPUs running together in clusters. The GPU supply chain is the single largest infrastructure story of the 2020s tech boom. Behind every AI capability is a stack of expensive GPUs running hot.
The Nvidia GPU lineup (mid-2026):
| GPU | Launch | Approximate price | Use case |
|---|---|---|---|
| A100 | 2020 | $10K-$15K | Legacy AI workloads |
| H100 | 2022 | $25K-$40K | Mainstream LLM training/inference |
| H200 | 2024 | $30K-$50K | Improved memory for large models |
| B100/B200 | 2024-2025 | $40K-$60K | Next-gen Blackwell... |