Founder conflict is unresolved disagreement between co-founders on strategy, role definitions, equity allocation, decision-making authority, work ethic, interpersonal dynamics, or vision for the company. It ranges in severity from minor disagreements that get resolved through normal conversation to existential conflicts that destroy companies. Founder conflict contributes to roughly 25% of venture-backed startup failures, according to Noam Wasserman's research at Harvard Business School, and remains one of the most-common and least-discussed failure modes in the startup ecosystem. It is the failure mode that founders most often underestimate at formation and the one that creates the most operational damage when it surfaces ...
Customer discovery is the systematic process of interviewing prospective customers to validate the problem, customer segment, and value proposition before building significant product. It tests whether the problem actually exists, whether you're targeting the right people, and whether your solution actually solves their problem. Popularized by Steve Blank in "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" (2005) and embedded in Eric Ries's "Lean Startup" methodology, customer discovery is the foundational practice that separates founders building from customer evidence from founders building from assumption. It is the single most-important discipline at pre-PMF startups and the one founders most often skip.
The Steve Blank framework:
Ph...
The COO (Chief Operating Officer) is the senior executive responsible for running operational execution across the company's functions. The specific scope varies significantly by company depending on what the CEO chooses to delegate and what the company structurally needs. The COO often serves as the CEO's right-hand operator and integrator across departments (sales, marketing, customer success, finance, HR, sometimes engineering) rather than running any single function. The role is highly contextual rather than universally present at venture-backed startups; many successful companies operate without a COO at all. It is the most variable and contested of the C-suite roles, with no consensus definition and significant variability in actu...
Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting effective input prompts to large language models to elicit desired outputs. It encompasses techniques like clear instructions, few-shot examples, structured output specifications, chain-of-thought reasoning, role assignments, context provision, and iterative refinement. The discipline is part craft (intuition for what works) and part science (testable techniques), and is the dominant way to control LLM behavior without fine-tuning. It's the AI-era equivalent of writing good SQL queries: a transferable skill that materially impacts the quality of what you can build.
The core techniques that work:
Clear, specific instructions: vague prompts produce vague outputs.
Bad: "Summariz...
The Transformer is the neural network architecture introduced in Google's 2017 paper "Attention is All You Need" that now powers virtually every modern foundation model. It replaced earlier sequence-processing approaches (RNNs and LSTMs) and underlies GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, BERT, T5, and others. Its core innovation is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to consider all positions in a sequence simultaneously rather than processing them sequentially. It's the architectural breakthrough that enabled the modern AI revolution; understanding it (at least conceptually) is foundational vocabulary for anyone in tech.
The pre-Transformer era:
RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) and LSTMs (Long Short-Term Me...
A party round is a financing round with many small investors (typically 10 or more checks all under $250K) and no single lead investor. It is common at seed and pre-seed stages when founders pull together capital from a wide angel network rather than concentrating on a single institutional check. It is distinct from traditional lead-investor-led rounds where one investor anchors the round with majority of the capital and sets the terms. The term carries a mildly pejorative connotation among institutional investors, suggesting the founder couldn't attract a serious lead.
The structural reality: party rounds typically involve 10-30+ individual angels and small institutional investors each writing $10K-$100K checks, totaling $500K-...
A shareholder agreement is a private contract among a corporation's shareholders governing share transfers, board elections, and shareholder votes on major decisions. Sometimes called a stockholders' agreement, it often includes the corporation itself as a party and supplements the bylaws with contractual obligations that bind only the signing parties. Provisions typically cover transfer restrictions, drag-along and tag-along rights, board representation, voting agreements, information rights, preemptive rights, and dispute resolution. Unlike bylaws, which govern the corporation and apply to all shareholders by default, a shareholder agreement is a contract that binds only the parties that sign it.
The major provisions...
How startups end (and what determines who gets what). This cluster covers the major exit paths (IPO, acquisition, SPAC, direct listing), deal structures and terms (LOI, definitive agreement, earnout, holdback, reps and warranties), the rights that affect exit outcomes (drag-along, tag-along, ROFR, lockup), and the mechanics specific to exits (liquidation waterfall, exit multiples, QSBS). 26 entries.
Exits are the moment when years of equity decisions become real money. Founders should know this vocabulary years before they need it.
A business cofounder is the founding-team member responsible for non-technical functions: customer development, sales, fundraising, business model design, go-to-market, recruiting, and operations. They often (but not always) serve as the CEO, hold founder-level equity (typically 25-50% in two-founder teams), and bring skills that complement the technical cofounder's product-building capabilities. The role is controversial in startup discourse because the value-add is often less visible than a technical cofounder's "they built the product" contribution. It is the most-debated cofounder role in startup culture: dismissed by some as the "idea guy" or "BizDev person" who isn't actually building anything, defended by others as...
SEM (search engine marketing) is the practice of using paid search advertising to capture intent-based traffic from search engine results pages. It runs primarily through Google Ads and Microsoft Ads (Bing), with bidding done at the keyword or audience level and pricing set by auction. It is the paid counterpart to SEO in the broader category of search marketing; in modern usage, "SEM" is typically used to mean paid search specifically, even though the original umbrella definition included both paid and organic.
The terminology genuinely is a mess. Historically, "SEM" referred to all search marketing activity (paid + organic = SEO + paid search). Over the last decade, common industry usage has narrowed SEM to mean paid search only, with...