Exits & M&A

How startups end (and what determines who gets what). This cluster covers the major exit paths (IPO, acquisition, SPAC, direct listing), deal structures and terms (LOI, definitive agreement, earnout, holdback, reps and warranties), the rights that affect exit outcomes (drag-along, tag-along, ROFR, lockup), and the mechanics specific to exits (liquidation waterfall, exit multiples, QSBS). 26 entries.

Exits are the moment when years of equity decisions become real money. Founders should know this vocabulary years before they need it.

Exit paths

• [Exit Strategy], the framing question.
• [IPO], going public on a major exchange.
• [Direct Listing], public without raising new capital.
• [SPAC], Special Purpose Acquisition Company.
• [Acquisit...

North Star Framework

North Star Framework vs North Star Metric: the framework is the full operating system, the NSM plus input metrics, business outcomes, team rituals, and decision rules. The [North Star Metric] is just the single number at the center of it. If you're picking the metric, read NSM; if you're installing the operating system around it, you're in the right place.

The North Star Framework is the strategic alignment system developed by Amplitude that connects a North Star Metric to input metrics and business outcomes. The North Star Metric is the one metric most-correlated with long-term business success and customer value; input metrics are levers teams can move to improve it; business outcomes are the financial results the N...

Business Planning

Strategy meets numbers meets operations. This cluster covers business strategy frameworks (BMC, lean canvas, SWOT, blue ocean), financial modeling and projections, SaaS metrics (ARR, MRR, CAC, LTV, NRR, Rule of 40), market sizing (TAM/SAM/SOM, addressable market), sales operations (pipeline, quota, cycle length), CFO-level financial discipline (working capital, AR/AP, DSO, deferred revenue), and the reporting cadences that hold it all together (board deck, OKRs, KPIs, business reviews). 87 entries.

This is the largest cluster, the home for everything quantitative about running a startup.

Strategy frameworks

• [Business Plan], the traditional plan document.
• [Business Strategy], the overall strategic framing.
• [Business Model ...

Product

The discipline of building things people want. This cluster covers product management as a function, strategy and discovery, the agile/scrum/kanban operating frameworks, prioritization methods (RICE, Kano), design and UX, testing (alpha, beta, usability), and launch mechanics. 40 entries.

Product is where insight meets execution. The frameworks here are the operating systems most modern product orgs run on.

Product management roles and function

• [Product Management], the discipline and the role.
• [Product Team], how product orgs are structured.
• [Chief Product Officer], the senior product role.

Strategy and discovery

• [Product Strategy], the answer to "what we're building and why."
• [Product Vision], the longer-term north star.
• [Produ...

Growth & Marketing

The discipline of turning awareness into customers and customers into expansion. This cluster covers the full marketing funnel from awareness to advocacy, every major acquisition channel (paid, organic, content, referral, influencer, affiliate), the metrics that govern each (conversion, CPA, CPC, ROAS), retention and customer success (NRR, churn, NPS, onboarding), brand (identity, voice, positioning, awareness), and the lifecycle marketing patterns that compound. 62 entries.

This is the cluster where the most cross-discipline vocabulary lives. Founders without marketing backgrounds need every term here.

The marketing funnel and growth model

• [Marketing Funnel], the awareness-to-purchase path.
• [Growth Marketing], broader t...

Token Economics

Token economics is the discipline of understanding and modeling the per-token costs and revenue of AI applications. Tokens (sub-word units of text) are the unit of pricing for most LLM APIs and the basis on which AI application unit economics must be modeled. The model includes input tokens (prompt + context + RAG content), output tokens (model response), cache savings, and the per-query economics that determine whether AI applications are profitable. It's the financial layer beneath every AI application.

What a token is:

Token: sub-word unit of text used by LLMs. Roughly 0.75 English words per token, or 4 characters.

Tokenization examples:

• "The quick brown fox" → 5 tokens (one per word, roughly).
• "Tokenization" → 3 tokens ...

AI Strategy

The vocabulary of the AI era of startups. This cluster covers the foundational concepts of modern AI (foundation models, LLMs, generative AI), the architecture and operations that power AI applications (Transformer, training data, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, RAG, context window), the economics that determine viability (inference cost, GPU cost, token economics), the strategic moats AI companies build (data flywheel, AI moat, wrapper vs thick wrapper), the safety considerations (alignment, safety), and current-era terms (multimodal, agents, vibe coding). 22 entries.

This cluster is the freshest in the lexicon. If you're building anything AI-adjacent in 2025, every entry here is operational vocabulary.

Foundations

• [AI Startu...

What is customer segmentation?

Customer segmentation is the process of dividing a large group of customers into smaller groups, based on certain characteristics. It’s also sometimes called “market segmentation.”

Why is customer segmentation important?

Customer segmentation is important because it helps companies market more effectively to their customers. If you want your marketing budget to go as far as it can, it’s essential that you know who you’re marketing to and what they respond to when it comes to advertisements.

For example, if your company had a customer base that included both 14-year-old boys and 45-year-old men, you wouldn’t use the same marketing techniques with the two groups, would you? But you can’t even know that you have ...

How do you fire a Founder without having them leave the startup?

You give them a bullshit title.

The moment you hear about a new CEO being anointed at a startup, and you learn that the previous Founder/CEO is now the "Chief Vision Officer," or "Head of Strategy," or in some cases even "Chairman" — you pretty much know they got canned.

It usually means things have gone horribly wrong and from the outside you may not see it. But short of a company preparing for an IPO, the Founder rarely voluntarily relegates themselves to some arms-length title. It's almost always foisted upon them by someone else in the organization (typically investors) who are pushing hard for regime change.

So yeah, it sucks. But the way to make it less sucky is to unde...

Who should you know about when it comes to startup growth? Who should you be following for the latest in growth tips? Which growth experts regularly deliver valuable, actionable content to their followers? If these questions resonate, this article is for you.

We’ve looked far and wide to find the very best in startup growth. We’ve pulled a collection of well-known startup growth leaders who have been there and done it. Everyone in this list has been part of startups that have rapidly scaled. Some have synthesised their knowledge into well regarded books, some have built their own fractional CMO services others work purely as advisors.

Matt Lerner

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewlerner/ Website - https://www.systm.co/about-ma...