04
Vocabulary
The terms the industry coined — each one given its author, its year, and where it first appeared in print.
6 entries in this section
- 01Frank Robinson Coined It; Eric Ries Made It Mandatory'Minimum viable product' was first used publicly by Frank Robinson of SyncDev in 2001; Eric Ries put it into wide circulation in The Lean Startup (2011). The piece traces the term through its two published origins and documents how the definition shifted between them.
- 02The Phrase Marc Andreessen Posted in June 2007Marc Andreessen defined 'product-market fit' in a June 2007 blog post — 'being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market' — and the phrase became the industry's primary benchmark for early-stage viability. The piece reads the original post against how the term entered pitch decks and investor letters.
- 03Aileen Lee Counted Thirty-Nine, November 2013Aileen Lee's TechCrunch piece of 2 November 2013 — 'Welcome to the Unicorn Club' — identified 39 US software companies founded since 2003 that had reached $1bn in private valuation; she called them unicorns. The piece reads the original article against the count as it stood by the end of 2023.
- 04Grow Faster Than Is Sensible: The Argument Reid Hoffman Made in 2018Reid Hoffman's Blitzscaling (2018, co-authored with Chris Yeh) argued that in winner-take-most markets, speed of growth mattered more than efficiency — and that accepting operational chaos was the rational choice. The piece reads the book's central claim against the companies it cited and their subsequent records.
- 05The Pivot Was Always There; Someone Just Named ItThe term 'pivot' — a structured course correction that preserves one element of the original strategy — entered startup vocabulary through Eric Ries and Steve Blank's writings in the late 2000s, but the practice predates the word by decades. The piece compares the documented pivots of Slack, YouTube and PayPal against the definition as written.
- 06Three Numbers Every Investor Update CarriesBurn rate, runway and the J-curve are the three metrics that appear in almost every venture investor update, yet each has a different origin and a different definition depending on who is using it. The piece traces each term to its earliest documented use in venture correspondence and fund reporting.