References
Concepts, tools & terms.
- 1000 True Fans Apr 2026
Kevin Kelly's 2008 essay arguing that a creator doesn't need a mass audience to build a sustainable career — only about 1,000 "true fans" willing to pay $100/year each. It becam…
- 10x Rule Apr 2026
Grant Cardone's thesis (from his 2011 book The 10X Rule) that most people dramatically underestimate the effort and action required to hit a goal — so the fix is to set targets…
- 2 Sigma Problem Apr 2026
Benjamin Bloom's 1984 finding: students who receive one-on-one tutoring perform two standard deviations (2σ) better than students in conventional classrooms — meaning the averag…
- 20VC Apr 2026
Podcast and media brand by Harry Stebbings, started in 2015 as a solo Skype show while he was a teenager and now one of the most-listened-to venture capital podcasts in the worl…
- 7 Powers Apr 2026
Hamilton Helmer's 2016 strategy book laying out the seven (and only seven, he argues) durable sources of business power: Scale Economies, Network Economies, Counter-Positioning,…
- A_B Testing Apr 2026
An experimentation method where two (or more) variants of a product are shown to different users and the better-performing one wins. Invaluable for optimizing existing products,…
- a16z Apr 2026
Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. a16z redefined modern VC by bundling a full operating platform…
- Access Products Apr 2026
Category of products whose primary value is granting the customer access to something otherwise gated — a community, a creator, a live event, a dataset, an API, an expert networ…
- Active Listening Apr 2026
Active Listening is the mechanism behind the K in TALK Framework — putting visible effort into hearing the other person and showing that you heard them. In Alison Wood Brooks's…
- ADP Apr 2026
Automatic Data Processing — the $120B payroll, HR, and benefits giant founded in 1949, processing paychecks for roughly one in six American workers. ADP is often cited as the pr…
- Agentic Commerce Apr 2026
The emerging category where AI agents — not humans — browse, compare, negotiate, and transact on a user's behalf. Stripe, Shopify, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all building protoco…
- AI Apr 2026
Artificial intelligence, used in this context as shorthand for the current generation of machine learning systems — especially LLMs and multi-modal models. In product conversati…
- AI Maxing Apr 2026
Term coined on the 20VC episode with Gokul Rajaram ("8 Moats") describing a new cohort of young, often dropout founders who use AI tools so aggressively and natively that they c…
- AI Research Labs Apr 2026
OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, and a handful of others — the frontier model labs doing closed-door research at massive scale. William Hockey's one explicit exception to his c…
- Airbnb Apr 2026
Global marketplace for short-term rentals and experiences, founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk. A Y Combinator alumnus (W09). Nearly collapsed during the…
- Alzheimer's Apr 2026
A progressive neurodegenerative disease that causes memory loss, cognitive decline, and personality change — the most common form of dementia. Currently incurable; treatments sl…
- Amazon Apr 2026
E-commerce and cloud computing giant founded by Jeff Bezos. Katie Burke cites Amazon as a counterintuitive example of good company culture — they pit internal teams against each…
- American Express Apr 2026
Financial services and travel company. Under CEO Ken Chenault (2001-2018), navigated 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. Chenault's experience with crisis leadership directly in…
- Anthropic Apr 2026
AI safety company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including Dario and Daniela Amodei, best known for the Claude family of models. Positioned as the "safety-first" f…
- Apple Apr 2026
The company Karthik references most often as the gold standard for craft, restraint, and end-to-end experience design. For the vault's purposes, Apple is less a company than a d…
- Apple Garamond Apr 2026
Customized version of ITC Garamond (condensed to 80% width) that was Apple's corporate typeface from 1984 through the late 1990s — the font on the original Mac packaging, the "T…
- AppLovin Apr 2026
Mobile advertising and app-monetization platform (NASDAQ: APP) that became one of the surprise stock-market stories of 2024–2025, rallying on the strength of its AXON AI ad engi…
- Architectures of Care Apr 2026
The philosophical anchor for SupportWire's brand — inspired by Richard Brautigan's "Machines of Loving Grace," creating a productive tension between cold mechanics and deep huma…
- Asking Apr 2026
Asking is the A in Alison Wood Brooks's TALK Framework — the discipline of turning curiosity into questions that actually land. Brooks's research identifies Follow-up Questions…
- Asset Class Apr 2026
A category of investment with a distinct risk/return profile — equities, bonds, real estate, private credit, venture, etc. William Hockey's reframing of Venture Capital as "just…
- Atlassian Apr 2026
Australian enterprise software company (Jira, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket) founded in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. Famous in SaaS lore for reaching $100M AR…
- Attrition Apr 2026
Employee turnover rate. Katie Burke calls it a classic lagging indicator — by the time six people leave, you already have a massive problem. At HubSpot, the only predictive surv…
- Australia Apr 2026
William Hockey cites Australia as having one of the most concentrated banking markets in the developed world — even more so than Canada — with the "Big Four" (CBA, Westpac, ANZ,…
- AutoResearch Apr 2026
General term for AI systems that autonomously conduct multi-step research — issuing search queries, reading results, synthesizing, and iterating without a human in the loop betw…
- B612 Mono Apr 2026
Open-source monospaced typeface designed by Intactile DESIGN for Airbus, originally for aircraft cockpit displays where legibility under vibration and glare is safety-critical.…
- Back to Starbucks Apr 2026
Brian Niccol's turnaround slogan after taking over as Starbucks CEO in September 2024. The premise: Starbucks had drifted from its identity as a "third place" community coffeeho…
- Bang & Olufsen Apr 2026
The Danish luxury audio and electronics brand, famous for turntables, speakers, and telephones that treat industrial design as the point of the product. One of its phones — the…
- Bank Regulation Apr 2026
The overlapping federal and state regimes that govern US banks — OCC, FDIC, Federal Reserve, CFPB, state banking departments. William Hockey navigated a particularly hostile str…
- Banking Charter Apr 2026
The legal authorization required to operate as a bank in the US — either federal (OCC-issued, nationally chartered) or state-issued. Acquiring one from scratch is nearly impossi…
- Banking in China Apr 2026
William Hockey reads 19th-century Chinese banking history for leverage, not current events. The pattern he's mining: how pre-modern credit, silver, and correspondent networks ac…
- Baremetrics Apr 2026
SaaS metrics dashboard (MRR, churn, LTV, cohort analysis) founded by Josh Pigford in 2013, built originally as a transparent "open startups" story where the company's own number…
- Beijing Apr 2026
Capital of China. William Hockey, borrowing from Dan Wang, uses Beijing as one half of a pairing with San Francisco — the two most consensus-driven societies in the world, where…
- Benchmark Apr 2026
Legendary early-stage venture capital firm founded in 1995, famous for its deliberately small partnership (usually six or fewer equal partners, no associates) and for leading se…
- Bermula Serif Apr 2026
Contemporary serif typeface currently in evaluation for SupportWire marketing alongside Apple Garamond and B612 Mono — see SupportWire/Brand/marketing-typeface-decision.md. Chos…
- Berry-Gate Apr 2026
The HubSpot incident where the finance team showed berry consumption growing exponentially against headcount. Leadership replaced fresh berries with a smoothie bar — smoothies n…
- Bhagavata Apr 2026
Short for the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (or Srimad Bhagavatam) — one of the major Hindu scriptures, centered on the life and teachings of Krishna and composed roughly between the 8th and…
- Big Audacious Goals Apr 2026
Common reframing of Jim Collins's "BHAG" (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) from Built to Last (1994) — a 10-to-30-year goal so large and clear that it aligns an entire company without…
- Big Think Apr 2026
Long-running media brand (founded 2007, now owned by Freethink) featuring short-form video interviews with scientists, entrepreneurs, and public intellectuals — think TED-adjace…
- Blockbuster Apr 2026
Video rental chain that peaked around 9,000 stores in 2004 and was effectively extinct by 2013, famously destroyed by Netflix and its own refusal to kill the late-fee business m…
- Bluetooth Apr 2026
A short-range wireless protocol for connecting devices — headphones, keyboards, speakers, phones — without cables. Named after a 10th-century Scandinavian king. Quietly one of t…
- Boomerasking Apr 2026
Boomerasking is Alison Wood Brooks's term for asking a question purely as a setup to pivot the answer back to yourself — "How was your weekend? Mine was amazing, let me tell you…
- Brex Apr 2026
Corporate card and banking platform for startups, founded 2017 in San Francisco. Part of the 2018–2022 wave of fintechs that built consumer-grade experiences on top of legacy ba…
- Build (book) Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's 2022 book "Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making." Part memoir, part career playbook — Fadell walks through lessons from General Magic, Philips,…
- Build Collective Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's advisory and coaching practice for startup founders, named after his book Build (book). It pairs Fadell and his team with founders of hardware, climate, and deep-t…
- Bullet Journal Method Apr 2026
Analog productivity system created by Ryder Carroll in 2013 — a single notebook with a specific index, future log, monthly log, and daily log structure, using shorthand symbols…
- Bullseye Framework Apr 2026
Channel-selection framework from Traction (2014) by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. Given 19 possible acquisition channels (SEO, content, paid, PR, viral, offline ads, commun…
- CAA Apr 2026
Creative Artists Agency — the Hollywood and sports talent agency founded in 1975 by Michael Ovitz and four colleagues who left William Morris together. CAA became the most power…
- Canada Apr 2026
Country in North America. Tangential mention in vault context; no strategic relevance recorded yet.
- Canny Apr 2026
Product feedback, roadmap, and changelog SaaS founded in 2015 — the most direct competitor to FeatureOS. Canny is generally viewed as the category's "obvious pick," which means…
- ChartMogul Apr 2026
SaaS analytics platform (MRR, churn, cohorts, revenue recognition) founded in Berlin in 2014 by Nick Franklin. The more enterprise-leaning counterpart to Baremetrics, with deepe…
- ChatGPT Apr 2026
OpenAI's consumer AI product, launched November 2022, which became the fastest-growing software product in history and effectively defined the modern LLM market. Beyond the tech…
- Cheeky Pint Apr 2026
Podcast and YouTube show by Stripe co-founder and president John Collison, launched in 2024 — informal, pub-format conversations with operators, economists, and founders (Tyler…
- Chief People Officer Apr 2026
The executive role responsible for all people operations — recruiting, culture, compensation, development, and employee experience. Katie Burke held this role at HubSpot for 11…
- China Apr 2026
The world's second-largest economy, largest manufacturer, and the primary counterparty to US trade and monetary policy. In the William Hockey conversation, China shows up two wa…
- Chipotle Apr 2026
American fast-casual chain founded in 1993 by Steve Ells, famous for the "Food with Integrity" positioning and a tightly engineered assembly-line operating model. Frequently cit…
- Claude Apr 2026
Anthropic's family of large language models and the assistant product built on top of them. Positioned as the "thoughtful" alternative to GPT-2-lineage models and Google's Gemin…
- Claude Code Apr 2026
Anthropic's official terminal-based coding agent built on Claude, designed to read, edit, and run code directly in a developer's local environment. Part of the broader wave of C…
- COBOL Apr 2026
Legacy programming language from 1959 that still runs on some bank mainframes — and the source of the tired "banks run on COBOL" meme used to explain why Legacy Banking is slow.…
- Code Agents Apr 2026
The category of AI systems that don't just autocomplete code but take goals and execute multi-step engineering tasks — reading files, running commands, editing code, and verifyi…
- Codex Apr 2026
OpenAI's code-generation model lineage, originally released in 2021 as the engine behind GitHub Copilot, and relaunched as a full cloud-based coding agent in 2025. Part of the b…
- Coinbase Apr 2026
US-based cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong, and the first crypto company to go public on a US exchange (2021). Known inside Silicon Valley as much for i…
- Column Apr 2026
William Hockey's second company, founded in 2021. A US nationally-chartered bank built as software, selling APIs to fintech customers like Brex, Mercury, and Ramp. Entirely Self…
- Communication Apr 2026
Communication is the meta-concept underneath all of Alison Wood Brooks's work — her argument is that communication is the unit of a life. Careers, marriages, friendships, and le…
- Compound or Die Apr 2026
Parker Conrad's punchier framing of the Compound Software thesis: in the AI era, point-solution SaaS companies are dead on arrival because LLMs can re-skin any single workflow o…
- Compound Software Apr 2026
Parker Conrad's thesis — articulated through Rippling — that the future of B2B SaaS is not best-of-breed point tools, but integrated suites built on a shared data model. His arg…
- Considered Purchase Apr 2026
A marketing term for a product category where the buyer deliberates carefully, compares alternatives, and often consults other people before paying — the opposite of an impulse…
- Conversation Repair Apr 2026
Conversation Repair is the Conversation Science research area focused on how to recover after a rupture — a hurtful comment, a misunderstanding, a lost temper. The finding: rupt…
- Conversation Science Apr 2026
Conversation Science is the emerging academic field that studies conversation as a measurable phenomenon — using transcripts, NLP, and behavioral experiments to figure out what…
- Correspondent Banking Apr 2026
The system by which banks hold accounts with each other to move money across borders. A bank in Qatar that needs to pay a counterparty in Switzerland doesn't wire euros — it use…
- Craftsmanship Apr 2026
The discipline of caring about details others overlook — typography, spacing, copy, interaction, empty states — because they compound into a product that feels inevitable. For K…
- Crocs Apr 2026
The foam clog originally designed for boating, now a billion-dollar global fashion and comfort brand. Paola Antonelli put Crocs into MoMA's design collection because they change…
- Deal Velocity Apr 2026
Gokul Rajaram's framing of how AI is compressing enterprise sales cycles — the metric that used to be "did we close" is becoming "how fast did we close." His argument: AI-native…
- Deel Apr 2026
Global payroll and compliance platform founded in 2019 by Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang, famous in SaaS circles for one of the fastest ARR ramps in history — zero to $100M in under…
- Detroit Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's hometown — the heart of the American auto industry, Motown, and a city whose identity is tied to making physical things. A formative backdrop for a founder who spe…
- Developer Experience Apr 2026
The end-to-end quality of how a developer interacts with a product, platform, or API — from first docs read to first successful deploy to ongoing maintenance. DX is to developer…
- Digg Apr 2026
Social news aggregator founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose, which at its 2008 peak was the dominant front page of the internet — then collapsed in 2010 after a redesign (v4) that igno…
- Dilution Apr 2026
The reduction in percentage ownership that happens when a company issues new shares. William Hockey claims venture-backed founders typically lose 50–75% of their equity value to…
- Division of Self Apr 2026
Division of Self is a move from the Receptiveness Framework — naming two of your roles at once to de-escalate a hard conversation. Example: "As your daughter AND as your friend,…
- DOJ Apr 2026
The US Department of Justice. Most relevant here as the agency that blocked the Visa-Plaid deal in 2020–2021 on antitrust grounds, arguing Visa was buying Plaid specifically to…
- Dollar Hegemony Apr 2026
The geopolitical dominance of the US Dollar as the world's reserve and trade-settlement currency. William Hockey's claim: dollar hegemony is America's most powerful weapon, reac…
- Domain Modeling Apr 2026
The practice of building software around a precise, explicit representation of the real-world concepts in a business — users, accounts, feedback items, roadmap states — before w…
- DoorDash Apr 2026
US food delivery and logistics platform founded in 2013 by Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore; IPO'd in 2020. Famous for winning a brutal three-way market (vs. Ube…
- DRC Apr 2026
Democratic Republic of the Congo. Roughly 100 million people, mobile penetration under 25%, banking penetration under 5%, and extreme scarcity across most formal infrastructure.…
- Earnings Apr 2026
Company profit — the cash left over after paying costs and taxes. For William Hockey, earnings are not something to optimize against in quarterly reporting; they're the funding…
- Egocentrism Apr 2026
Egocentrism is the psychological default where your brain prioritizes your own perspective, needs, and memory over everyone else's — Alison Wood Brooks uses it to explain why co…
- Eight Moats Apr 2026
Gokul Rajaram's framework on defensibility for modern startups, presented on 20VC. He argues the classic moats (network effects, economies of scale) are joined by new ones in th…
- Emerging Markets Apr 2026
Countries outside the developed-economy core, typically with lower GDP per capita but often leapfrogging incumbents in financial services, mobile, and payments — see Kaspi in Ka…
- Emoji Apr 2026
Small pictographic icons used inline in text to convey emotion, tone, or objects. The first commercial set was designed by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. Years earlier,…
- Employer Brand Apr 2026
The practice of treating talent acquisition messaging with the same rigor as product marketing. Katie Burke argues most employer brands are undifferentiated — companies say the…
- eNPS Apr 2026
Employee Net Promoter Score — a survey measuring how likely employees are to recommend their workplace. At HubSpot, Katie Burke published every single comment from the eNPS surv…
- Enterprise Software Apr 2026
B2B software sold to large organizations — long sales cycles, high switching costs, multi-year contracts. William Hockey's argument: most enterprise software categories can't pr…
- EQ Apr 2026
Emotional intelligence — the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. Katie Burke…
- Eurodollars Apr 2026
US-dollar-denominated deposits held at banks outside the United States — historically in London, now across many jurisdictions. Some policymakers and fintech types argue for lea…
- Eye Gaze Apr 2026
Eye Gaze is a Conversation Science finding that people in group conversations instinctively look at the highest-Status person, which renders lower-status members functionally in…
- Facebook Apr 2026
Social network founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, now rebranded parent company Meta. The canonical case study in network-effect compounding, ruthless mobile pivoting (2012), an…
- Failure Forum Apr 2026
A practice introduced by Katie Burke at HubSpot where executives publicly dissected real failures — not "I work too hard" humblebrags but genuine flops. Part of the company's Ra…
- FeatureOS Apr 2026
Karthik's flagship product at Skcript: a unified platform for product feedback, roadmap, and changelog — the three surfaces a modern product team uses to talk to its customers a…
- Federal Reserve Apr 2026
The US central bank, which also operates the core payments infrastructure for the dollar system (Fedwire, FedNow, ACH). William Hockey racks Column's own hardware inside the Fed…
- FedEx Apr 2026
Overnight delivery company founded in 1971 by Fred Smith, famous for the "hub and spoke" logistics model and for nearly dying in its first year — a legendary story has Smith tak…
- Figma Apr 2026
Browser-based collaborative design tool founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, which displaced Sketch and Adobe XD by betting on multiplayer from day one. Acquired by…
- Fin Apr 2026
Intercom's AI customer service agent, launched in 2023 and the single biggest product bet of Intercom's recent era. Fin resolves support tickets end-to-end by reading a company'…
- First Round Apr 2026
Seed-stage venture firm founded in 2004 by Josh Kopelman, known less for its cheque sizes and more for First Round Review — one of the most widely read operating playbooks for e…
- First Round Capital Apr 2026
Early-stage venture capital firm known for investments in companies like Uber, Square, and Notion. Publishes the First Round Review, a long-form content platform for startup ope…
- folding@home Apr 2026
Stanford-led distributed computing project launched in 2000 that harnesses idle CPU and GPU cycles from volunteers' machines to simulate protein folding for disease research. At…
- Follow-up Questions Apr 2026
Follow-up Questions are the gold standard of Asking in Alison Wood Brooks's research — questions that build directly on what the other person just said, proving you were actuall…
- Formula 1 Apr 2026
The top tier of international single-seater motor racing — and a widely cited metaphor in founder circles for the compounding effect of 1% improvements across every subsystem. T…
- Founder Liquidity Apr 2026
The mechanism by which founders and employees convert equity into cash before a full exit. Historically via Secondary Sales arranged at fundraising events. Column's version is s…
- Founder Mode Apr 2026
A management philosophy coined by Paul Graham after Brian Chesky's 2024 Y Combinator alumni retreat talk. The core thesis: founders should stay deeply involved in product detail…
- Founder Risk Apr 2026
The personal downside a founder bears if the company fails — financial, reputational, and opportunity cost. William Hockey argues modern SV has engineered founder risk out of th…
- Fragile by Design Apr 2026
Book by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber (2014) arguing that banking crises are not accidents but the predictable outcome of political bargains between governments and banks…
- Frequent Flyers Apr 2026
Katie Burke's term for employees who show up in every Slack drama and feedback thread. The danger isn't just that they waste their own time — they recruit others into caring abo…
- Fuse Systems Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's 1999 hardware startup, which aimed to build a digital music player and home audio system years before the iPod. Fuse couldn't raise the capital needed to ship hard…
- Future Shape Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's investment firm, backing hardware, climate tech, health, and deep tech companies globally. Future Shape is explicitly anti-software-only — Fadell uses it to fund t…
- General Magic Apr 2026
The mythic Apple spinout founded in 1990 that tried to build the smartphone 15 years too early and failed commercially — but whose alumni went on to ship the iPod (Tony Fadell),…
- Glean Apr 2026
Enterprise AI search and assistant platform founded in 2019 by ex-Google search engineers including Arvind Jain. Glean indexes everything a company runs on — Slack, Google Drive…
- Google Apr 2026
Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin; search engine turned advertising monopoly turned everything-platform. For founders, Google is a reference on two opposite things a…
- Google Glass Apr 2026
Google's 2013 head-worn display — a small prism over one eye with a camera and touchpad on the temple. Famously flopped after a social backlash (the term "glasshole" entered the…
- GPT-2 Apr 2026
OpenAI's 2019 language model, 1.5 billion parameters — the one OpenAI initially refused to fully release citing misuse concerns, which is now remembered as both a historic overc…
- Graceful Exits Apr 2026
Katie Burke's framework for handling executive departures with consistency and dignity. Core principle: the why behind someone's exit is not the company's information to broadca…
- Gravity and Levity Apr 2026
Gravity and Levity is Alison Wood Brooks's framing that serious conversations need lightness to remain bearable — the two must be paired, not alternated. Pure gravity collapses…
- Green Apron Service Apr 2026
Starbucks' internal framing of its service culture, taught via the "Green Apron Book" given to every barista: be welcoming, be genuine, be knowledgeable, be considerate, be invo…
- Green Oaks Apr 2026
Concentrated, long-duration venture firm founded in 2020 by Andrew Wong and Neil Mehta (the Coatue alum), running a high-conviction book with early/growth positions in Figma, St…
- Gross Retention Apr 2026
The percentage of recurring revenue a SaaS company keeps from its existing customer base, excluding expansion — the rawest possible measure of whether customers stay. Distinct f…
- GSD Apr 2026
"Get Shit Done" — the startup shorthand for the bias toward execution over deliberation. Sheryl Sandberg famously wore a "GSD" badge at Facebook, and the phrase has become a cul…
- Gushing Neck-Wound Apr 2026
Shorthand for the kind of problem that is actively bleeding a business out — urgent, visible, impossible to ignore. The phrase gets invoked (including by Tobi Lütke) to distingu…
- Hacker News Apr 2026
Y Combinator's news aggregator, effectively the homepage of technical San Francisco. William Hockey cites it as one of the main inputs new engineering grads use to decide which…
- Haitian Revolution Apr 2026
The 1791–1804 slave uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that produced Haiti — the first independent Black republic and the only successful large-scale slave revolt i…
- Harvard Business School Apr 2026
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the MBA program in Boston where Alison Wood Brooks teaches as an associate professor. Notable here as the institution where her conversation cou…
- Harvey Apr 2026
AI legal assistant built on top of frontier LLMs, aimed at law firms and in-house legal teams. Often cited as one of the earliest examples of a vertical AI product winning real…
- Her (film) Apr 2026
Spike Jonze's 2013 film about a lonely man who falls in love with Samantha, an AI voice assistant. Routinely cited in AI product conversations as the archetype of a warm, ambien…
- High Output Management Apr 2026
Andy Grove's 1983 management book, still the sharpest practical guide for operating leaders ever written. Frames management as a production process — with leverage, output metri…
- HubSpot Apr 2026
Marketing, sales, and CRM platform co-founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. Publicly traded (NYSE: HUBS). Known for its culture code, inbound marketing methodology, and R…
- Illmatic Apr 2026
Nas's 1994 debut album, widely considered one of the most perfectly crafted records in hip-hop history. Ten tracks, no filler, a tight artistic statement from a nineteen-year-ol…
- Incentive Design Apr 2026
Bonus and compensation structure design. Charlie Munger's principle: keep it ruthlessly simple. Complexity doesn't prevent manipulation — it enables it. Katie Burke plays out fa…
- India Apr 2026
Country in South Asia, home base for Karthik Kamalakannan and Skcript. Relevant context for the CEO vault: the operating environment for FeatureOS and SupportWire is a small, In…
- Intel Apr 2026
Semiconductor company co-founded by Andy Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore. Grove's management philosophy — including the quote "great companies are defined by a crisis" — i…
- Inter Apr 2026
Open-source sans-serif typeface designed by Rasmus Andersson, originally for use in UI work at Figma. Became the default "serious software" typeface across a generation of start…
- Intercom Apr 2026
Customer messaging and support platform founded in 2011 by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett. Pioneered the in-app chat widget as a category and has sinc…
- Interruptions Apr 2026
Alison Wood Brooks distinguishes two kinds of Interruptions: on-topic interruptions (excitedly finishing someone's sentence or piling on their idea) are actually good — they sig…
- Invest Like The Best Apr 2026
Long-form business and investing podcast hosted by Patrick O'Shaughnessy, part of the Colossus network. Known for deep, prepared conversations with investors, founders, and oper…
- iPhone Apr 2026
Apple's smartphone, first shipped in 2007. Tony Fadell led hardware for the first three generations after shipping the iPod. The iPhone is the most successful product of its era…
- iPod Apr 2026
Apple's portable music player, first shipped in 2001. Tony Fadell led the team that built it across 18 generations, in partnership with Jeff Robbin on software and Jony Ive on i…
- iPod mini Apr 2026
The smaller, colored aluminum-bodied version of the iPod, introduced in 2004. It was initially mocked for being pricier than the entry-level iPod with less storage, but it quick…
- Jevons Paradox Apr 2026
Economics concept from William Stanley Jevons (1865): making a resource more efficient doesn't reduce total consumption — it increases it, because lower cost per unit unlocks ne…
- JPMorgan Chase Apr 2026
The largest US bank by assets and a perennial example of incumbent scale in Legacy Banking. William Hockey mentions Chase (alongside Wells Fargo) as the counterexample to the fi…
- Kaspi Apr 2026
Kazakh fintech that started as a lender, bought a bank, and then verticalized into nearly every adjacent surface — payments, e-commerce marketplace, taxes, DMV services, travel,…
- Kindness Apr 2026
Kindness is the K in Alison Wood Brooks's TALK Framework, and she defines it precisely — it's made of two components. First, respectful language: don't make the other person fee…
- Kinshasa Apr 2026
Capital of the DRC and one of the fastest-growing megacities in Africa, projected to become one of the world's largest by 2050. William Hockey uses Kinshasa as shorthand for "Em…
- knowledge graph Apr 2026
A structured network of entities (people, concepts, products) and the typed relationships between them. Unlike a folder hierarchy or a flat tag list, a knowledge graph captures…
- Land and Expand Apr 2026
B2B SaaS go-to-market pattern: sell a small, cheap, high-value foothold into one team at an account, then expand inside that account as usage and trust grow — more seats, more t…
- Latinotype Apr 2026
Independent type foundry based in Chile, founded in 2007, known for a catalog that balances rigorous craft with approachable, contemporary warmth. Latinotype faces tend to be fa…
- Layoff Hangover Apr 2026
Katie Burke's term for the two-to-two-and-a-half-year cultural aftershock following a layoff. Unfolds in three waves: immediate shock, survivor guilt, and lingering fear that po…
- Legacy Banking Apr 2026
Incumbent US banks — JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi — that dominate deposits, lending, and payments despite clunky software. The fintech narrative treats the…
- Levi's Apr 2026
The American denim company, founded 1853 in San Francisco. Tony Fadell's father worked there for 33 years — a fact Fadell repeatedly cites when talking about what it meant to gr…
- Levity Apr 2026
Levity is the L in Alison Wood Brooks's TALK Framework — humor, play, warmth, the willingness to be a little bit silly. The striking research finding: one successful joke in a g…
- Liberty Media Apr 2026
American media conglomerate controlled by John Malone, and the parent company of Formula 1 since its 2017 acquisition. Liberty's reinvention of F1 — leaning into social media, D…
- LinkedIn Apr 2026
Microsoft-owned professional network used as a default signaling and hiring surface. William Hockey calls it nearly useless for the only hiring question that actually matters to…
- Linux Apr 2026
Open-source Unix-like operating system kernel created by Linus Torvalds in 1991, now the foundation of nearly all server-side computing, Android, and most of the modern internet…
- Liquidation Preference Apr 2026
A VC deal term giving investors first claim on exit proceeds — typically 1x their investment before common shareholders see a dollar, sometimes stacked across multiple rounds or…
- LLMs Apr 2026
Large language models — neural networks trained on massive text corpora that generate and reason about language. The engine behind most current AI products, from general chatbot…
- Longevity Apr 2026
Staying power as a company — being around long enough that your mere existence becomes a signal. William Hockey argues longevity is a distribution channel in itself: buyers eval…
- Macintosh Apr 2026
Apple's personal computer line, first launched in 1984 with the Macintosh 128K. The Mac introduced a mass audience to the graphical user interface and the mouse — ideas borrowed…
- Macintosh 128K Apr 2026
The original Macintosh, launched January 24, 1984 with 128KB of RAM, a 9-inch black-and-white screen, a mouse, and a graphical user interface. Susan Kare designed every icon and…
- macOS Apr 2026
Apple's desktop operating system, originally released as Mac OS X in 2001 on a Unix foundation inherited from NeXT. macOS is the daily driver for most of the tech industry's des…
- Mahabharata Apr 2026
One of the two great Sanskrit epics of ancient India, several times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. At its center is a dynastic war between the Pandavas and Kaurav…
- Management Debt Apr 2026
Ben Horowitz's term (from "The Hard Thing About Hard Things") for the accumulated cost of short-term management shortcuts — giving two people the same title, avoiding a hard fir…
- Manager Mode Apr 2026
The conventional wisdom for running a scaled company: hire great people, trust them to do their jobs, and get out of the way. Brian Chesky argues this approach is "incredibly fa…
- Margin Lending Apr 2026
Borrowing against the value of securities you own, with the securities themselves as collateral. William Hockey's signature move: after the Visa-Plaid deal collapsed, he used ma…
- Marketo Apr 2026
Marketing automation platform acquired by Adobe in 2018 for $4.75B. Pioneered B2B marketing automation alongside Eloqua and HubSpot, focused on lead nurturing, scoring, and emai…
- Mercenaries Apr 2026
William Hockey's shorthand for pedigreed employees who optimize for options, logos, and resume arc. Useful short-term — they execute fast and don't need hand-holding — but not l…
- Mercury Apr 2026
Fintech banking startup built specifically for startups, founded by Immad Akhund in 2017. Offers business checking, treasury, venture debt, and corporate cards through a notably…
- Meta Apr 2026
Facebook's parent company, renamed in 2021 to signal the bet on VR/AR and the metaverse. Owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Reality Labs; operates one of the largest networ…
- Meta Ray-Bans Apr 2026
Meta's partnership with Ray-Ban (EssilorLuxottica) to ship camera- and AI-equipped smart glasses that look like regular eyewear. Widely viewed as the first consumer smart-glasse…
- microGPT Apr 2026
One of Andrej Karpathy's small, pedagogical GPT implementations — a minimal codebase intended to make transformer internals legible to anyone willing to read a few hundred lines…
- Microsoft Apr 2026
Technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Under CEO Satya Nadella (since 2014), reinvented itself as a cloud and AI leader. Brian Chesky cites Nadella as a rare n…
- Midjourney Apr 2026
Independent AI image generation company founded by David Holz in 2021, famously bootstrapped to hundreds of millions in revenue with a tiny team and no outside funding. Runs pri…
- Mission Apr 2026
The "why" of a company — the stated purpose team and customers rally around. William Hockey's heretical framing: you need a mission, but it's maybe fifth on a list of five prior…
- Missionaries Apr 2026
Mission-driven employees who will go to the ends of the earth for the work. The opposite of Mercenaries. William Hockey's nuance: pure missionaries tend to fracture at commercia…
- MIT Apr 2026
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, MA. Home to the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, and the venue where Paola Antonelli interviewe…
- MIT Media Lab Apr 2026
MIT's famous interdisciplinary research lab, founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte. Known for projects at the edges of computing, design, biology, and media — from early wearab…
- MIT Morningside Academy for Design Apr 2026
MIT's cross-disciplinary design institute, launched in 2022 with a foundational endowment from the Morningside Foundation. MAD sits across MIT's schools of engineering, architec…
- MoMA Apr 2026
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Its design collection, curated for three decades by Paola Antonelli, has become one of the most influential arbiters of what counts as…
- Monday.com Apr 2026
Work OS / project management platform founded in Israel in 2012, IPO'd on NASDAQ in 2021. Competes with Asana, ClickUp, and Notion on the horizontal work management layer, known…
- Monoblock chair Apr 2026
The ubiquitous plastic stacking chair found everywhere from backyards to refugee camps — a single injection-molded piece of polypropylene, anonymous and near-disposable. Paola A…
- Montessori Apr 2026
Educational approach emphasizing self-directed activity, hands-on learning, and collaborative play. During the pandemic, Katie Burke's team at HubSpot stood up an online Montess…
- MySpace Apr 2026
Early social network that peaked around 2006-2008 before being displaced by Facebook. Acquired by News Corp for $580M in 2005, eventually sold for $35M in 2011 — one of the cano…
- Nabla Apr 2026
Nabla is an AI medical scribe that listens to doctor-patient conversations and produces structured clinical notes. Roughly seven years in development, it ships tightly scoped me…
- nanoGPT Apr 2026
Andrej Karpathy's most widely used small GPT implementation — roughly 300 lines of PyTorch that can train a working transformer language model on a single GPU. nanoGPT became th…
- Negotiation Apr 2026
Negotiation is the traditional MBA and law-school course that Alison Wood Brooks was originally recruited to Harvard Business School to teach, before she built Talk (course) ins…
- Nest Apr 2026
The connected-home company Tony Fadell co-founded in 2010, best known for the Nest Learning Thermostat. Google acquired Nest in 2014 for $3.2B — at the time the second-largest a…
- Net Revenue Retention Apr 2026
SaaS metric measuring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, including expansion, net of churn and downgrades. Calculated as (Starting ARR + Expansion - Churn -…
- Netflix Apr 2026
Streaming and studio company founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1997, originally mailing DVDs before pivoting to streaming and then original content. Famous for its c…
- NetSuite Apr 2026
Cloud ERP originally founded by Evan Goldberg with backing from Larry Ellison in 1998, acquired by Oracle in 2016 for $9.3B. Powers finance, inventory, and operations for mid-ma…
- Network Effects Apr 2026
Property where a product becomes more valuable as more people use it — the moat that built Facebook, WhatsApp, Uber, and Airbnb. Distinguished from scale economies: network effe…
- NeXT Apr 2026
Computer company founded by Steve Jobs in 1985 after his ouster from Apple, sold back to Apple in 1996 for $429M — the acquisition that brought Jobs home and seeded the technolo…
- No Priors Apr 2026
AI-focused podcast hosted by Sarah Guo (Conviction) and Elad Gil, launched in 2023. Features long-form conversations with founders and researchers across the AI stack — OpenAI,…
- Nokia Apr 2026
The Finnish phone giant that dominated the mobile handset market in the late 1990s and 2000s. Between 2004 and 2006, Nokia's MP3-capable phones looked like the biggest existenti…
- NTT DoCoMo Apr 2026
Japan's largest mobile carrier, historically famous as the birthplace of commercial emoji in 1999, when designer Shigetaka Kurita created a 176-icon set for its i-mode service.…
- NVIDIA Apr 2026
Semiconductor company founded by Jensen Huang in 1993. Originally a graphics chip maker, now the dominant force in AI compute infrastructure. Known for Jensen Huang's extreme Fo…
- One-Page Business Plan Apr 2026
Planning framework from Kraig Kramers's CEO Tools 2.0 that compresses a company's strategy onto a single sheet: vision, mission, objectives, strategies, and action plans. The di…
- Open-ended Questions Apr 2026
Open-ended Questions are questions that can't be answered with yes/no — they require the other person to actually say something, which gives the conversation somewhere to go. In…
- OpenAI Apr 2026
AI research lab and company founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others, originally as a non-profit. Built ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the API lay…
- OpenAI Wrappers Apr 2026
Pejorative for startups that package a thin layer of prompt engineering and UI around frontier models like GPT, Claude, or Gemini without owning the model, the data, or the dist…
- OpenClaw Apr 2026
Project referenced in an Andrej Karpathy podcast appearance — context unclear and likely either a tooling experiment or a passing reference misheard from the transcript. Stub ke…
- Outcome-Based Pricing Apr 2026
Pricing model where the customer pays based on results delivered — tickets resolved, revenue generated, hours saved — rather than seats or usage. Re-emerging as a serious conver…
- P&G Apr 2026
Procter & Gamble — the consumer packaged goods conglomerate behind Tide, Pampers, Gillette, Pringles, and dozens of other household brands. Famous as the training ground for gen…
- Palantir Apr 2026
Data analytics and software company founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Joe Lonsdale, originally built on PayPal fraud detection techniques applied to counterterroris…
- Parkinson's Law Apr 2026
"Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." Coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in a 1955 Economist essay. For founders it's a weaponized principle: short dead…
- Performance Review Apr 2026
Formal evaluation process for employee performance. Katie Burke has shared her own performance review with her team for eight consecutive years — elements redacted — as a Trust-…
- Perspective Taking Apr 2026
Perspective Taking is the conscious override to Egocentrism — the effortful act of imagining what the conversation looks like from the other person's seat. Alison Wood Brooks's…
- Philips Apr 2026
The Dutch electronics conglomerate that once made everything from light bulbs to hi-fi to medical imaging. Tony Fadell worked at Philips in the 1990s on early mobile computing a…
- Pirouette Apr 2026
Paola Antonelli's current MoMA exhibition, which gathers design objects that change human behavior — think Crocs, the Monoblock chair, and Spanx. The show's argument: design isn…
- Plaid Apr 2026
Fintech API company co-founded by William Hockey and Zach Perret in 2013 that became the default plumbing between US bank accounts and consumer apps like Venmo, Robinhood, and C…
- Platform Building Apr 2026
The strategic move of turning a product into a platform others build on top of — APIs, integrations, app marketplaces, developer ecosystems. The promise: Network Effects and swi…
- Play The Table Not The Ball Apr 2026
Framing from Tobi Lütke (Shopify CEO): in pool, amateurs focus on the ball in front of them; pros think two shots ahead about where the cue ball ends up on the table. Applied to…
- Podium Apr 2026
Messaging and customer interaction platform for local businesses, founded in 2014 in Lehi, Utah. Consolidates reviews, texting, payments, and now AI agents for home services, au…
- Press Release Method Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's framework from Build (book): before writing a single line of code, write a one-page press release for the product as if it were shipping today. The exercise forces…
- Pricing Levers Apr 2026
Framework from Gokul Rajaram for thinking about pricing as a set of independent dials rather than a single number: unit of value, packaging tiers, price metric, discount structu…
- Pringles Apr 2026
Stackable potato crisp brand originally developed at P&G, now owned by Kellogg's (Kellanova). The relevant thread for founders: Brian Niccol ran the Pringles brand at P&G before…
- Product Durability Apr 2026
Gokul Rajaram concept: how well a product's moat holds up through the AI transition. A product is "durable" if it has defensible data, distribution, or workflow lock-in that AI…
- Productboard Apr 2026
Product management platform founded in 2014 by Hubert Palan, focused on centralizing customer feedback, prioritization, and roadmaps for enterprise PM teams. Direct category com…
- Profitability Apr 2026
Operating earnings — what's left after costs. In William Hockey's framing, profitability in high-switching-cost B2B is not a finance line, it's a trust product. When a Column cu…
- ProfitWell Apr 2026
Subscription analytics and retention tooling company founded by Patrick Campbell, acquired by Paddle in 2022. Built the most-cited public dataset on SaaS benchmarks — churn, pri…
- Qatar Apr 2026
Gulf state and one of the world's largest LNG exporters. William Hockey uses a Qatar-to-Switzerland gas trade as the cleanest example of Dollar Hegemony: two neutral, non-Americ…
- Quarterly Priorities Manager Apr 2026
Execution tool from Kraig Kramers's CEO Tools 2.0: every quarter, the CEO publishes the 3-5 priorities that matter most, shares them with the team, and tracks progress ruthlessl…
- Qwen Apr 2026
Family of open-source large language models from Alibaba's DAMO Academy, released in multiple sizes from small instruct models to massive frontier-class variants. A serious cont…
- Radical Transparency Apr 2026
The practice of sharing information broadly within an organization, even when convention says to restrict it. At HubSpot, Katie Burke made every employee a designated insider po…
- Rama Apr 2026
Hindu deity and hero of the Ramayana, seventh avatar of Vishnu. In Devdutt Pattanaik's leadership writing (see Leader by Pattanaik), Rama is the archetype of the rule-following…
- README
Reference notes for concepts, companies, products, places — everything that isn't a person but deserves its own graph node. Auto-populated by the /summarize skill when a term is…
- Receptiveness Framework Apr 2026
The Receptiveness Framework is a language recipe developed by Julia Minson, Hanne Collins, and Mike Yeomans for staying in hard conversations without escalating. The components:…
- Recoleta Apr 2026
Display serif typeface designed by Latinotype (Chile), characterized by soft curves, generous counters, and a warm, editorial personality — sitting somewhere between Cooper and…
- Regulatory Battles Apr 2026
Fights between companies and regulators over licensing, compliance, or market access. Often faced by disruptive platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and crypto firms. For founders, regu…
- Rippling Apr 2026
Parker Conrad's unified HR, IT, and finance platform. Rippling's thesis: employee data is the graph that connects payroll, devices, apps, and permissions — so build one system i…
- Ruby Apr 2026
Dynamic, object-oriented programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto in 1995. Optimized for programmer happiness and expressiveness. Tobi Lütke famously chose Ruby for Sh…
- Ruby on Rails Apr 2026
Web framework built on Ruby by David Heinemeier Hansson at Basecamp in 2004. Rails popularized convention over configuration, making it possible for tiny teams to ship full-stac…
- Russia Apr 2026
Used by William Hockey as the core example of Dollar Hegemony in practice. Even after Sanctions and a stated intent to "de-dollarize," a significant share of Russia's trade with…
- Salesforce Apr 2026
The original SaaS company, founded by Marc Benioff in 1999. Pioneered the "No Software" pitch and the multi-tenant cloud CRM that became the template for every B2B SaaS since. T…
- San Francisco Apr 2026
William Hockey's long-time base and the target of most of his sharpest critique. Hockey and Dan Wang frame SF as a consensus society on par with Beijing: everyone reads the same…
- Sanctions Apr 2026
Financial tools — OFAC designations, asset freezes, correspondent-account restrictions — the US uses to cut countries, companies, or individuals off from the dollar system. Will…
- SavvyCal Apr 2026
Scheduling tool built by Derrick Reimer (co-founder of Drip alongside Rob Walling). SavvyCal's positioning: a more thoughtful Calendly, built for people who care about the recip…
- Science, the Endless Frontier Apr 2026
Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to President Truman, commissioned by FDR before his death. It argued that government should fund basic scientific research in peacetime the way it ha…
- Seat Pricing Apr 2026
The default B2B SaaS pricing model: charge per user, per month. Simple to understand, simple to budget, but structurally misaligned with value delivered — customers pay more as…
- Secondary Sales Apr 2026
Share sales by existing equity holders (founders, employees, early investors) rather than new primary issuance by the company itself. In venture, secondaries are usually bundled…
- Self-Awareness Apr 2026
The ability to accurately assess your own strengths, weaknesses, and impact. Katie Burke identifies it as the primary bottleneck in the VP-to-C-level transition — leaders start…
- Self-Funding Apr 2026
William Hockey's preferred framing for how he built Column. Broader than bootstrapping: includes founder capital, Margin Lending against existing wealth, and reinvested Earnings…
- Semafor Apr 2026
News publication launched in 2022 by Ben Smith (ex-BuzzFeed, NYT) and Justin Smith (ex-Bloomberg Media). Known for its "Semaform" article structure separating facts, analysis, a…
- SendGrid Apr 2026
Transactional email infrastructure company founded in 2009, acquired by Twilio in 2019 for $3B. Along with Stripe and Twilio, defined the "developer-first API business" category…
- Sequoia Apr 2026
Sequoia Capital. Arguably the most influential venture firm in history — early investors in Apple, Google, Oracle, Cisco, Airbnb, Stripe, WhatsApp, and ByteDance. Known for its…
- ServiceTitan Apr 2026
Vertical SaaS for home services contractors — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pest control. Built by founders whose fathers ran service businesses, which gave them the empathy to de…
- Shop Pay Apr 2026
Shopify's accelerated checkout — one-tap payments across any Shopify store and increasingly outside it. Shop Pay is Shopify's most important defensive and offensive play: it cap…
- Shopify Apr 2026
E-commerce platform founded by Tobi Lütke in 2006, built on Ruby on Rails. Shopify's bet: every brand should own its storefront rather than renting shelf space on Amazon. Now th…
- Sierra Apr 2026
AI customer experience company co-founded by Bret Taylor (chairman of OpenAI, former co-CEO of Salesforce) and Clay Bavor (ex-Google). Sierra builds AI agents that handle custom…
- Silicon Valley Apr 2026
The region of the San Francisco Bay Area that became the global epicenter of the tech industry, anchored by Stanford, Sand Hill Road, and a dense network of founders, operators,…
- Skcript Apr 2026
Karthik's parent company and product studio. Parent of FeatureOS (profitable, $15K MRR) and SupportWire (pre-launch AI customer support product). Skcript's identity is craft-for…
- Skcript Serif Apr 2026
Custom serif typeface designed for the Skcript brand system. A signal of craft seriousness — most SaaS companies rent typography from Google Fonts; Skcript commissioned its own.…
- Sketch Apr 2026
The design tool that defined the pre-Figma era. Mac-only, file-based, and dramatically better than Photoshop for UI work when it launched in 2010. Sketch's eventual displacement…
- Skin in the Game Apr 2026
Nassim Taleb's phrase for personal financial and reputational risk — the condition of bearing real downside from your own decisions. William Hockey wants skin in the game to be…
- Skip-Level Meetings Apr 2026
A management practice where a leader meets with employees who report to their direct reports (or even deeper). Brian Chesky practices this aggressively at Airbnb, treating 40-50…
- Slack Apr 2026
Workplace messaging platform founded by Stewart Butterfield, originally built as an internal tool at his failed gaming company. Slack defined the "product-led growth" playbook f…
- Small Talk Apr 2026
Small Talk is the bottom layer of Alison Wood Brooks's Topic Pyramid — and contrary to the usual cynicism, it isn't shallow or pointless. It's the pregame that establishes trust…
- Social Media Apr 2026
The broad category of networked platforms built around user-generated content and social feeds — Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and their descendants. Tony Fadell treats social…
- Solvency Apr 2026
The ability to meet your obligations as they come due. For a bank, a hard regulatory line; for a founder, a state of mind. William Hockey's line: "what gets me out of bed is sol…
- Sonos Apr 2026
Wireless home speaker company that defined the category for a decade with beautiful industrial design and reliable multi-room audio. Recent history is a cautionary tale about sh…
- Sony Apr 2026
The Japanese electronics giant that defined portable consumer audio for a generation with the Sony Walkman. Sony was the reference company Apple was measured against when Tony F…
- Sony Walkman Apr 2026
Sony's cassette-based portable music player, launched in 1979 and named the specific product line that made personal audio a mainstream behavior — the direct ancestor of the iPo…
- Spanx Apr 2026
The shapewear brand founded by Sara Blakely in 2000, which turned an overlooked garment category into a multi-billion-dollar business. Paola Antonelli included Spanx in the Piro…
- Specialist Apr 2026
Someone with deep, narrow domain focus rather than broad generalism. William Hockey's self-identification: he's been working on the same stack — bank APIs, payments, regulation,…
- Square Apr 2026
Payments company founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009, now part of Block. Started with a physical card reader that let any small business accept credit cards from a p…
- Stablecoins Apr 2026
Crypto-adjacent digital currencies pegged to fiat (usually USD) via reserves or algorithms. The most honest use case for blockchain so far: fast, cheap, global dollar rails for…
- Standard Oil Apr 2026
John D. Rockefeller's oil monopoly, built in the late 19th century by controlling refining, logistics, and distribution rather than inventing new technology. William Hockey uses…
- Starbucks Apr 2026
The global coffee chain that productized the "third place" — neither home nor office — and built one of the most successful loyalty and mobile ordering programs in retail. For f…
- Status Apr 2026
Status, in Alison Wood Brooks's definition, is not class or pedigree — it's "liking and respect in the eyes of others," and it's topic-dependent and conversation-specific. The s…
- Stripe Apr 2026
Payments infrastructure company founded by Patrick Collison and John Collison in 2010. Stripe redefined what a developer-first business looks like: documentation as a product, A…
- Stripe Billing Apr 2026
Stripe's subscription and recurring billing product. Handles plans, proration, trials, metered usage, invoicing, and tax — the unsexy machinery every SaaS company needs and very…
- Succession Planning Apr 2026
Strategic capability mapping for leadership roles. Katie Burke reframes it from insurance ("what if someone gets hit by a bus?") to strategy ("what leadership capabilities do we…
- Superpower Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's product test: a great product doesn't just solve a problem, it gives the user the feeling of having a new capability they didn't have before. The iPod made you fee…
- SupportWire Apr 2026
Karthik's pre-launch customer support AI product, designed to replace seat-priced helpdesk SaaS with outcome-based AI deflection. The thesis: the Seat Pricing model is structura…
- Supreme Apr 2026
NYC streetwear brand that built a billion-dollar business on scarcity — weekly "drops" of limited inventory, no restocks, long lines, and a deliberate refusal to scale distribut…
- SWIFT Apr 2026
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — the messaging network international banks use to settle cross-border trade. SWIFT itself doesn't move money; it sta…
- Switzerland Apr 2026
Neutral European country and major energy importer. Appears in William Hockey's gas-trade anecdote as the buyer in a Qatar-to-Switzerland deal that still settles in US Dollar —…
- System 1 vs System 2 Apr 2026
Daniel Kahneman's framework from "Thinking, Fast and Slow." System 1 is fast, intuitive, automatic — the pattern-matcher. System 2 is slow, deliberate, effortful — the reasoner.…
- Systems Design Apr 2026
Tobi Lütke's core methodology discipline. Systems design is the practice of thinking about businesses, products, and organizations as interconnected systems with feedback loops,…
- Talent Flywheel Apr 2026
The compounding effect of treating departing employees well. Katie Burke argues that how you handle exits creates a reputation loop: people who leave talk, and their experience…
- Talk (book) Apr 2026
"Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves" is Alison Wood Brooks's book, published by Crown Currency in January 2025. It's the book version of her top-ra…
- Talk (course) Apr 2026
Talk is Alison Wood Brooks's course at Harvard Business School, officially titled "Talk: How to Talk Goodter in Business and Life." The misspelling "Goodter" is intentional and…
- TALK Framework Apr 2026
The TALK Framework is Alison Wood Brooks's 4-letter operating system for good conversation: Topics, Asking, Levity, Kindness. Her core argument is that these four compress the e…
- Tesla Apr 2026
American electric vehicle and energy company founded in 2003, led by Elon Musk since 2008. Tesla vertically integrated batteries, software, manufacturing, and retail — a rare fu…
- The 5 Second Rule Apr 2026
The 5 Second Rule is Mel Robbins's 2017 book and her breakout hit. The core idea: when you feel the impulse to act on something that matters (get out of bed, make the call, spea…
- The CEO Signal Apr 2026
Semafor's podcast and newsletter aimed at CEOs, featuring long-form conversations with operators running public and private companies. Useful for decoded strategy takes rather t…
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things Apr 2026
Ben Horowitz's 2014 book on the parts of running a company nobody teaches — layoffs, demoting a loyal friend, near-death pivots, firing executives. Introduces the Wartime CEO vs…
- The Inner Game of Tennis Apr 2026
Timothy Gallwey's 1974 book nominally about tennis but actually about performance under pressure — the idea that Self 1 (the judgmental mind) sabotages Self 2 (the body that alr…
- The Let Them Theory Apr 2026
The Let Them Theory is Mel Robbins's 2024/2025 1 bestseller and the biggest commercial hit of her career. The core idea is a two-word mantra — "Let them" — applied to the exhaus…
- The Resistance Apr 2026
Steven Pressfield's concept from The War of Art — the invisible inner force that rises up whenever you try to do creative, meaningful work. Procrastination, rationalization, sud…
- The Social Radars Podcast Apr 2026
Podcast co-hosted by Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy, both of Y Combinator. Features interviews with founders and operators on leadership, company-building, and the transit…
- They Ask, You Answer Apr 2026
Marcus Sheridan's content marketing framework and 2017 book: answer every question your customers actually ask — including the uncomfortable ones about price, problems, and comp…
- Toast Apr 2026
Boston-based vertical SaaS company building an all-in-one point-of-sale, payments, and back-office platform for restaurants. Went public in 2021 and is frequently cited as the c…
- Topic Prep Apr 2026
Topic Prep is Alison Wood Brooks's term for spending 30 seconds before a conversation brainstorming Topics you might discuss. Her research finding: only about 10% of people actu…
- Topic Pyramid Apr 2026
The Topic Pyramid is Alison Wood Brooks's 3-layer model of conversation: Small Talk at the base, tailored talk in the middle (topics specific to this person and this relationshi…
- Topics Apr 2026
Topics is the T in Alison Wood Brooks's TALK Framework — the what of a conversation, the raw material everything else is built on. Her research shows that great conversationalis…
- Trade Desk Apr 2026
Independent programmatic advertising platform founded by Jeff Green in 2009, serving ad agencies and brands on the buy side. The Trade Desk positioned itself deliberately agains…
- Trust Apr 2026
The foundational currency of the Chief People Officer role, according to Katie Burke. Destroyed the moment you share someone's private feedback with the board or CEO for persona…
- TSMC Apr 2026
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — the world's largest contract chip foundry, fabricating silicon for Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and nearly every major fabless chip designer.…
- Twilio Apr 2026
Communications platform-as-a-service founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, offering APIs for SMS, voice, video, and email. Twilio popularized the "software people love by developers"…
- Twitter Apr 2026
Microblogging platform launched in 2006, renamed X after Elon Musk's $44B acquisition in 2022. Historically the default public square for tech, journalism, and founders — where…
- TypeScript Apr 2026
Statically-typed superset of JavaScript, created at Microsoft by Anders Hejlsberg and released in 2012. TypeScript compiles to plain JS but adds a type system that catches entir…
- Ulysses Apr 2026
Two references collide on this name. In Greek myth, Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus — the strategic, enduring hero of Homer's Odyssey, often cited in leadership books as…
- Unbounce Apr 2026
Landing page builder founded in 2009 in Vancouver, aimed at marketers who want to ship and A/B test pages without engineering. Unbounce is a canonical case study in productizing…
- Unit Economics Apr 2026
The per-customer (or per-unit) revenue and cost breakdown of a business, used to test whether the underlying model makes money before layering on top-of-funnel spend. Classic me…
- University of Michigan Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's alma mater, where he studied computer engineering. Michigan shaped a certain kind of Midwestern hardware-plus-software sensibility that shows up repeatedly in his…
- Unlearning Apr 2026
Paola Antonelli's term for the habit-breaking required when a new modality (voice, AI, gesture, ambient computing) shows up. The instinct is to bolt the new capability onto the…
- US Dollar Apr 2026
The world's reserve currency. Roughly 75% of global trade still settles in USD, via the Correspondent Banking / SWIFT / Federal Reserve stack — including trades between countrie…
- Usage-Based Pricing Apr 2026
Pricing model where customers pay for what they actually consume — API calls, messages sent, rows processed — instead of fixed per-seat subscriptions. Popularized by Twilio, Sno…
- USB Apr 2026
Universal Serial Bus — the cable and protocol standard that replaced the tangle of parallel, serial, PS/2, and FireWire ports on personal computers starting in the mid-1990s. US…
- Venture Capital Apr 2026
Capital raised from institutional investors (LPs) and deployed into high-growth private companies in exchange for equity. William Hockey's thesis: VC is one Asset Class, not a l…
- Vertical SaaS Apr 2026
Software built for a single industry — restaurants, construction, dental clinics, trucking — as opposed to horizontal tools that serve every industry shallowly. Vertical SaaS wi…
- Visa-Plaid deal Apr 2026
The 2020 agreement for Visa to acquire Plaid for $5.3B, announced in January 2020 and blocked by the DOJ in November 2020 on antitrust grounds. DOJ argued Visa was buying Plaid…
- Vishnu Apr 2026
In Hinduism, Vishnu is the preserver deity of the Trimurti — the one who descends into the world as an avatar whenever dharma is threatened. Unlike Shiva (dissolution) or Brahma…
- Vishnu Purana Apr 2026
One of the eighteen major Puranas of Hindu literature, centered on the deity Vishnu and his avatars. The text blends cosmology, genealogy, and narrative to transmit dharmic prin…
- VS Code Apr 2026
Microsoft's free, open-source code editor released in 2015, now the dominant developer IDE by a wide margin. Built on Electron and extended through a massive marketplace, VS Cod…
- Walkman Apr 2026
Shorthand for Sony Walkman — the portable cassette player launched by Sony in 1979 that created the category of personal, on-the-go music. The cultural shorthand for "music in y…
- Wall Street Apr 2026
Shorthand for the US financial industry centered in lower Manhattan. William Hockey's analogy: "San Francisco today is more like Wall Street in the 1990s than a Cambridge resear…
- Wartime CEO Apr 2026
Concept from Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things: the leadership mode required when the company is fighting for survival, not optimizing for growth. A Peacetime CEO…
- Way Stations Apr 2026
Tony Fadell's term from Build (book) for the shippable, revenue-generating milestones that sit between v1 and the long-term vision. Way stations let you stay alive and learn whi…
- Wells Fargo Apr 2026
Major US retail and commercial bank. William Hockey pairs it with JPMorgan Chase as an example of a Legacy Banking incumbent with a clunky consumer app — and then flips the usua…
- Wharton Apr 2026
Wharton is the University of Pennsylvania's business school, where Alison Wood Brooks earned her PhD studying emotions and Negotiation. The work she did there on how feelings sh…
- WhatsApp Apr 2026
Messaging app founded in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19B — still one of the largest tech acquisitions ever. At acquisition WhatsApp had r…
- Windows Apr 2026
Microsoft's operating system family, launched in 1985 and still the dominant desktop OS by global install base. The platform that, along with Office, defined the PC era and fund…
- Windows 95 Apr 2026
Microsoft's 1995 release of Windows, the one that brought the Start menu, taskbar, and 32-bit computing to the mainstream. The launch is remembered as a cultural moment — midnig…
- Work Products Apr 2026
Distinction from Gokul Rajaram's moats framework: Work Products actually produce outcomes (a closed ticket, a shipped feature, a delivered meal) and should be priced on those ou…
- Workday Apr 2026
Enterprise SaaS for HR, finance, and planning, founded in 2005 by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle. Workday became the incumbent cloud HRIS…
- Workforce Planning Apr 2026
Headcount and role planning across the organization. Katie Burke argues it must now account for whether work units should be done by people or AI agents. At Harvey, she runs an…
- Xerox PARC Apr 2026
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the legendary research lab that invented the graphical user interface, the mouse, laser printing, Ethernet, and much of modern personal comput…
- Y Combinator Apr 2026
Silicon Valley startup accelerator founded in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell. YC invented the modern batch-based accelerator model…
- Zendesk Apr 2026
Customer support SaaS founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, became the default helpdesk for mid-market and enterprise, and was taken private in 2022 by a PE consortium for $10.2B. Zend…
- Zenefits Apr 2026
HR and benefits SaaS founded by Parker Conrad in 2013, briefly valued at $4.5B before a 2016 compliance scandal forced Conrad out. The experience shaped Conrad's second act at R…
- Zero Questioners Apr 2026
Zero Questioners (ZQs) is Alison Wood Brooks's term for people who ask literally no questions in a conversation — they just talk, react, and talk more. They're the worst offende…
- Zuora Apr 2026
Subscription billing and monetization platform founded in 2007 by Tien Tzuo, a former Salesforce executive who coined the phrase "subscription economy." Zuora handles the unglam…
- Zynga Apr 2026
Social gaming company founded in 2007 by Mark Pincus, famous for FarmVille, Words with Friends, and a Facebook-era growth playbook that became the template for viral distributio…