Startup
Lingo
Lingo
Coined by Aileen Lee, this mythical creature represents a private startup valued at $1 billion or more.
What is a unicorn?
He founded Amazon in 1994 from his garage in Seattle.
Who is Jeff Bezos?
This Asian country is home to Samsung and a thriving startup scene called “Pangyo Techno Valley.”
What is South Korea?
On Shark Tank, he’s known as “Mr. Wonderful.”
Who is Kevin O’Leary?
This startup began as a college “hot or not” game at Harvard.
What is Facebook?
This term describes self-funding a business without outside investment.
What is bootstrapping?
With a valuation once over $47 billion, this coworking company’s IPO imploded in 2019 due to governance issues.
What is WeWork?
Known for its super-apps like WeChat, this country is a global digital powerhouse.
What is China?
This 2010 film chronicled the legal and ethical drama surrounding Facebook’s founding.
What is The Social Network?
This was the name of Google’s failed social network that aimed to rival Facebook.
What is Google+?
This type of funding round, usually the first institutional investment, occurs after seed funding and often includes VC involvement.
What is a Series A round?
Before becoming a microblogging giant, this platform began as a podcasting startup called Odeo.
What is Twitter?
Shopify, a leader in e-commerce, was founded and is headquartered in this country.
What is Canada?
This HBO series followed a fictional startup called Pied Piper navigating Silicon Valley’s tech scene.
What is Silicon Valley?
This emerging field of technology, called BCIs for short, focuses on the creation of machines that can interact directly with the human brain, such as the neural interfaces developed by companies like Neuralink.
What are Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs)?
This term describes a startup that grows revenue without a proportional increase in cost, often using scalable systems.
What is operating leverage?
Known for his viral essays, he co-founded this influential startup accelerator in 2005, which went on to launch companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe.
Who is Paul Graham?
This European country is the birthplace of Spotify and has earned a reputation as one of the most innovative in the world.
What is Sweden?
Amanda Seyfried portrayed this controversial founder in the series The Dropout.
Who is Elizabeth Holmes?
This technology, called NLP for short, allows for the simulation of human conversation, with popular examples including Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.
What is natural language processing (NLP)?
This key metric, used in SaaS, calculates the percentage of revenue retained from existing customers over a set period, accounting for upgrades, downgrades, and churn.
What is Net Revenue Retention (NRR)?
This co-founder of Napster later became Facebook’s first president—and helped secure early funding from Peter Thiel.
Who is Sean Parker?
This country’s capital, Tallinn, has produced more startups per capita than almost anywhere in Europe—including Skype.
What is Estonia?
This rapper and business mogul made early investments in Uber.
Who is Jay-Z?
This 2021 three-letter acronym became a punchline after virtual art and apes tanked in value.
What is NFT?