Kickstarter is the reward-based crowdfunding platform launched April 2009 that has facilitated over $7 billion in pledges across millions of successfully-funded projects. It operates on an all-or-nothing funding model where projects only collect funds if they meet their full goal within the campaign window, typically 30 days, with backers receiving products, perks, or experiences rather than equity in the project creator. The model is distinct from equity crowdfunding platforms like Wefunder and Republic. It is the canonical reference for the reward-based crowdfunding category and the platform that proved consumer products could be funded by their future customers before the product existed.
The structural mechanics: project cre...
A weekly business review (WBR) is the recurring leadership-team meeting that reviews execution metrics, surfaces issues, makes tactical decisions, and aligns leadership. Typically 60-90 minutes, it's one of the operational rhythms that distinguishes well-run companies and the meeting where most weekly tactical decisions happen. It is the leadership team's primary operational rhythm.
The standard WBR structure (60-90 minute meeting):
Metrics review (20-30 minutes):
Issue surfacing (15-20 minutes):
Equity split is how a startup's founder shares are divided among co-founders at incorporation, recorded in the founders agreement and on the cap table. It is one of the most consequential decisions the founders will ever make together, and unlike almost every other early decision, it is very hard to undo.
In Noam Wasserman's research on more than 10,000 founders ("The Founder's Dilemmas," 2012), the most common pattern is an equal split: roughly 73 percent of founding teams divide equity equally, often within a month of starting the company. Wasserman calls this the "quick handshake" split and finds it correlates with worse outcomes, because it usually skips the harder conversation about who is contributing what and what they w...
Continuous discovery is the practice of conducting weekly customer touchpoints by the product trio (PM, designer, engineer) to inform ongoing product decisions. It was popularized by Teresa Torres in Continuous Discovery Habits (2021) and is structured around mapping desired outcomes to opportunities to solutions to assumption tests, rather than running discovery in concentrated batches separate from delivery. It is the operational evolution of Marty Cagan's product-discovery framing, focused on making customer evidence a weekly rhythm rather than a project.
The core practices Torres specifies: weekly customer touchpoints (at minimum, a 30-minute conversation with a real customer each week, by the whole trio, not just t...
Pre-money valuation is the agreed value of a company immediately before a new investment round closes. Post-money valuation is the pre-money plus the amount raised in that round. The new investor's ownership percentage is calculated as their investment divided by the post-money valuation, and the entire round economics flow from these two numbers and a small set of related mechanics (option pool placement, convertible conversion, anti-dilution adjustments).
The math is straightforward, and the difference is exactly the round itself:
| Term sheet language | Pre-money | Investment | Post-money | New investor ownership |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| "$5M at $20M pre-money" | $20M | $5M | $25M | 20% ($5M/$25M) |
| "$5M at $25M post-money" | $20M | $5M | $25M | 2... |
Defensibility is the ability of a business to sustain competitive advantage over time. It encompasses moat categories (network effects, scale, brand, switching costs, regulatory, IP) plus operational excellence, execution velocity that compounds small advantages faster than they can be copied, and continued investment in the mechanisms that produce defensibility. The discipline is more dynamic than "moats" suggests because most advantages erode over time without continued effort. It is the operational sister of moats: moats are the structures; defensibility is the practice of maintaining and strengthening them.
The defensibility framework:
Structural defensibility (moats):
User research is the practice of generating evidence about user needs, behaviors, and pain points through systematic methods, then synthesizing that evidence into actionable insights. Methods include interviews, observation, surveys, usability testing, diary studies, and analytics, and the output informs product, design, and marketing decisions. It is the input layer underneath product discovery, UX work, value proposition development, and most credible go-to-market positioning.
The discipline splits along two axes that matter. The qualitative versus quantitative axis: qualitative research (interviews, observation, usability tests) tells you why users do what they do and is best run in small N with rich detail; quantitative re...
An executive summary is a 1 to 3 page prose document summarizing a startup's business, market, financials, team, and capital ask for investors. It covers business model, traction, market opportunity, and the capital ask, more substantive than a one-pager and more concise than a full business plan. It's used as a companion artifact to a pitch deck for investors who prefer prose, as a leave-behind that captures more nuance than slides allow, and as a primary artifact in some institutional-investor processes (especially family offices, growth-equity firms, and corporate-venture groups). It is the format that bridges the visual-heavy pitch deck and the written depth of a business plan.
The structure of a typical investor execu...
Issued shares is the total number of shares a corporation has actually issued to stockholders across the company's history. It is distinct from authorized shares (the legal maximum permitted by the charter) and outstanding shares (issued minus treasury shares), counted cumulatively before any reductions for repurchased or canceled shares. It is one of three closely-related but distinct share-count concepts that founders need to understand for accurate cap table management.
The three share-count concepts:
Accessibility (a11y) is the practice of designing products usable by people with disabilities, governed by WCAG 2.x and legally required under the ADA and EAA. The 11 in a11y stands for the 11 letters between the "a" and the "y". The disability scope spans visual impairments (low vision, blindness, color blindness), auditory impairments (deaf, hard of hearing), motor impairments (limited mobility, tremors), and cognitive impairments (dyslexia, ADHD, autism). The European Accessibility Act became enforceable June 2025. It is one of the most-under-invested-in product disciplines despite affecting a meaningful share of every product's user base.
The WCAG 2.x standard (current version 2.2, published October 2023) organizes accessi...