References

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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,…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A progressive neurodegenerative disease that causes memory loss, cognitive decline, and personality change — the most common form of dementia. Currently incurable; treatments sl…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

Open-source monospaced typeface designed by Intactile DESIGN for Airbus, originally for aircraft cockpit displays where legibility under vibration and glare is safety-critical.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Contemporary serif typeface currently in evaluation for SupportWire marketing alongside Apple Garamond and B612 Mono — see SupportWire/Brand/marketing-typeface-decision.md. Chos…

The HubSpot incident where the finance team showed berry consumption growing exponentially against headcount. Leadership replaced fresh berries with a smoothie bar — smoothies n…

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…

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…

Long-running media brand (founded 2007, now owned by Freethink) featuring short-form video interviews with scientists, entrepreneurs, and public intellectuals — think TED-adjace…

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…

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 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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Country in North America. Tangential mention in vault context; no strategic relevance recorded yet.

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…

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…

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…

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…

The executive role responsible for all people operations — recruiting, culture, compensation, development, and employee experience. Katie Burke held this role at HubSpot for 11…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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 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 is the emerging academic field that studies conversation as a measurable phenomenon — using transcripts, NLP, and behavioral experiments to figure out what…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Democratic Republic of the Congo. Roughly 100 million people, mobile penetration under 25%, banking penetration under 5%, and extreme scarcity across most formal infrastructure.…

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 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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

Emotional intelligence — the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. Katie Burke…

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 is a Conversation Science finding that people in group conversations instinctively look at the highest-Status person, which renders lower-status members functionally in…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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'…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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),…

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…

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'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…

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…

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 is Alison Wood Brooks's framing that serious conversations need lightness to remain bearable — the two must be paired, not alternated. Pure gravity collapses…

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…

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…

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…

"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…

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…

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…

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 (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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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'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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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'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'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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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 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…

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…

SaaS metric measuring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, including expansion, net of churn and downgrades. Calculated as (Starting ARR + Expansion - Churn -…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

"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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Product management platform founded in 2014 by Hubert Palan, focused on centralizing customer feedback, prioritization, and roadmaps for enterprise PM teams. Direct category com…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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:…

Display serif typeface designed by Latinotype (Chile), characterized by soft curves, generous counters, and a warm, editorial personality — sitting somewhere between Cooper and…

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…

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…

Dynamic, object-oriented programming language created by Yukihiro Matsumoto in 1995. Optimized for programmer happiness and expressiveness. Tobi Lütke famously chose Ruby for Sh…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Financial tools — OFAC designations, asset freezes, correspondent-account restrictions — the US uses to cut countries, companies, or individuals off from the dollar system. Will…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

William Hockey's preferred framing for how he built Column. Broader than bootstrapping: includes founder capital, Margin Lending against existing wealth, and reinvested Earnings…

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…

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 Capital. Arguably the most influential venture firm in history — early investors in Apple, Google, Oracle, Cisco, Airbnb, Stripe, WhatsApp, and ByteDance. Known for its…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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'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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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, 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…

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's subscription and recurring billing product. Handles plans, proration, trials, metered usage, invoicing, and tax — the unsexy machinery every SaaS company needs and very…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 —…

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.…

Tobi Lütke's core methodology discipline. Systems design is the practice of thinking about businesses, products, and organizations as interconnected systems with feedback loops,…

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: 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 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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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 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…

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…

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…

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — the world's largest contract chip foundry, fabricating silicon for Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and nearly every major fabless chip designer.…

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"…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Software built for a single industry — restaurants, construction, dental clinics, trucking — as opposed to horizontal tools that serve every industry shallowly. Vertical SaaS wi…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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'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…

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…

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…

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 (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…

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…

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…