An S Corporation is a US federal tax election that allows a domestic corporation or LLC to pass profits and losses through to shareholders. Named after Subchapter S of the Internal Revenue Code, the election is not a separate entity type but a tax classification that avoids the double taxation C-corporations face. S-corp status is subject to restrictions on shareholder type, count (100 maximum), and stock structure (one class only) that make it largely incompatible with venture-backed startups. It is a popular structure for small businesses with US-citizen owners and incompatible with the cap-table realities of most institutional fundraising.
The restrictions that disqualify most venture-track startups: maximum 100 shareholder...
The VP of Sales is the senior executive responsible for building the sales organization and scaling from founder-led selling to a repeatable rep-led motion. Sometimes called Head of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, or Chief Commercial Officer at scale. The VP-S hires and manages sales reps and sales managers, owns revenue targets and forecasting, partners with marketing on demand generation, and partners with product on what customers want. The hire is one of the most-common executive hiring mistakes founders make because companies often hire VP Sales before the underlying sales motion is repeatable, leading to expensive failures. It is one of the highest-leverage hires when timed correctly and one of the most-expensive mistakes when ...
A stock split is a corporate action that increases the number of outstanding shares by a defined ratio while proportionally reducing per-share value. A 10-for-1 split converts each $1 share into ten $0.10 shares, maintaining the same total market capitalization and ownership percentages, used at private startups to increase share counts before significant grants and at public companies historically to manage share price into a target trading range. It is an economically neutral action at the company level but has real practical impact on how the cap table looks, how share grants are sized, and how the stock is perceived by various stakeholders.
The mechanic of a stock split:
A vesting cliff is the minimum time period a person must remain with a company before any granted equity vests. Leaving before the cliff date forfeits the entire grant. The startup standard is a one-year cliff inside a four-year vesting schedule, applied to both employees and founders, and built into virtually every cap-table-tool default (Carta, Pulley, AngelList Equity).
In practice, the one-year cliff works as a binary test. An employee granted 48,000 options on a four-year monthly schedule vests zero options for the first 365 days. On day 366, exactly 12,000 options (25% of the grant) vest at once. From then on, the remaining 36,000 vest at 1,000 per month for three years. The cliff exists to protect the company and the ca...
A trade secret is confidential business information that derives economic value from secrecy and is subject to reasonable efforts to maintain that secrecy. Covered information includes formulas, processes, algorithms, customer lists, source code, manufacturing techniques, pricing strategies, internal documentation, and training methods. Trade secrets are protected under federal law via the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 and under state law in essentially all 50 states, with protection lasting indefinitely as long as the secret remains secret. It is the IP category that protects much of what software companies create, and the protection most-overlooked by founders who assume their IP is automatically covered by some other cate...
Accounts Receivable (A/R) is the balance-sheet asset that tracks money customers owe for products or services already delivered but not yet paid for. It's recorded as a current asset because the company has a legal claim to be paid, and tracked with aging buckets (0-30 days, 31-60, 61-90, 90+) that reveal how quickly customers are actually paying. A/R represents revenue that's been recognized but not yet collected; healthy A/R turns into cash on time; aged A/R becomes collection risk.
The basic mechanics:
Customer signs a $50K contract with Net-30 payment terms. Service is delivered (or in SaaS, the recognized portion is delivered). On the day of invoice:
A career ladder is a documented set of role levels (typically L1-L8 or equivalent) defining the expectations, scope, impact, and compensation range at each level. It serves as the framework for promotion decisions, compensation alignment, and retention conversations, with explicit progression criteria that tell employees what they need to do to advance. It's the structural answer to "what am I working toward?" that becomes critical as a company scales past ~30 employees.
The standard tech ladder structure:
| Level | Title | Years experience | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 | Associate Engineer / IC | 0-2 | Small individual tasks |
| L2 | Engineer / IC | 2-4 | Owns features |
| L3 | Senior Engineer / Senior IC | 4-8 | Owns systems, mentors |
| L4 | Staff Engineer / Staff IC | 8... |
Growth equity is private investment in established but still-growing companies, typically structured as minority stakes (10-40% ownership). Target companies have proven business models and meaningful revenue ($20M-$200M typically) and are often profitable or near-profitable. The capital is used to accelerate growth in working businesses rather than to fund risky early-stage development, with growth equity sitting between venture capital (earlier stage, smaller checks, higher risk) and private equity buyouts (control investments, often debt-heavy, mature companies), and being the dominant capital source at growth-stage tech companies. Growth equity firms include General Atlantic, Insight Partners, Summit Partners, TA Associates...
Blue Ocean is a strategic framework popularized by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their 2005 book "Blue Ocean Strategy," describing the practice of creating uncontested market space (the "blue ocean") rather than competing in existing markets (the "red ocean") characterized by direct competition, narrow margins, and customer-driven price erosion, with the central thesis being that companies should create new demand by combining differentiation and low cost rather than choosing between them in existing markets, with the framework being widely cited and often misapplied because most claimed "blue oceans" turn out to be small niches in existing red oceans rather than genuinely new market spaces. It is one of the most-popular str...
Deferred revenue is cash a company has collected but hasn't yet earned, sitting on the balance sheet as a liability because service is still owed. It's counterintuitive: the company has the money, but accounting rules treat it as something owed to the customer until service is delivered, which is why deferred revenue appears in the liabilities section of the balance sheet rather than as cash equity.
The mechanics:
A customer signs a 12-month SaaS contract on January 1 for $120K and pays the full $120K upfront. On January 1:
Each month thereafter, $10K of deferred revenue converts...