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...

Every Founder lies about why they are building a startup.

It's not because they are deceptive; I find Founders to be the most vulnerable and honest people I've ever met. It's because they aren't honest with themselves about why they are really building their startups.

When you ask a Founder why they are building, they are inevitably going to give you a stock answer like "I want to change the world!" or "I want to build a huge company!" and, of course, that sounds flowery and wonderful.

But that's not the real answer. The real answer is why are we building anything at all? What is the core purpose within us that drives us so hard to run through walls, empty our bank accounts, and set fire to our personal lives? It's not because we couldn't w...

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 ...

What actually happens when the Founder runs out of gas and just can't keep going?

Does the startup just... stop?

In a world where we're all facing some level of burnout, we also have to consider what would happen to our startups if we just stopped contributing.

I've coached nearly a thousand Founders and CEOs through this "outta gas" problem, as well as myself, and I can tell you without question — it's never as bad as it sounds!

Burnout is Inevitable

Look, we all get burnt out eventually.

It doesn't matter what kind of superstar athlete you are in your startup, there's only so much of this pace we can endure before we run out of gas. This shit is hard.

The late nights, the nonstop worrying, the constant "if we can just make it past this mi...

Sometimes, the most important path for a startup has nothing to do with the startup.

As my fellow video gamers know, when you pursue something other than the main questline in a game, it's known as a "side quest." It's a tiny detour that you take to see if there are other riches to be found elsewhere.

In startups, those side quests may feel like a distraction, but in fact, they are often exactly what we need to keep our startups alive.

I'm a giant fan of side quests at startups, partially because my ADHD loves distractions and partially because I've found they pay really well.

The Myth of the Linear Path

The reason we get pushback on taking on side quests is that we seem to keep believing the myth that startups should follow a linear path.

I'm an incredible failure. Or at least, I try to be.

Over the past 30+ years of building startups, my greatest superpower has been my willingness and ability to embrace failure. If we don't understand how important failure is in the startup game, we have almost no chance of ever succeeding.

That's because we're in the game of failure. Not all out failure, like we're going out of our way to tank our startups (although that's kind of the default condition, sadly).

We're in the business of taking massive chances on unproven markets and products. There's zero chance that we're just going to get it right miraculously without running into a massive number of failures along the way.

But that's fine — so long as we get freakishly good at how to fai...

The business of predicting the future is going out of business.

AI is making a mess of everything. No matter how good (or bad) you were at forecasting what’s next, you could always rely on a few basic assumptions.

You knew that you’d be hiring certain types of people. You knew where you’d be finding customers. You knew that if you built a product, it would be around long enough to sell it.

Now? WTF.

The Sands Are Shifting Too Fast

Now, if I build a product, I have no idea if I can pull traffic from Google, because I don’t even know if people will be using Google to search anymore (I don’t). When I go to build that product, I don’t know who I’m going to hire because AI now does the stuff I used to hire people for.

Even if I get the damn thin...

What happens when we trade productivity for humanity?

We didn’t mean to do this. We didn’t wake up one day and decide that connection was optional. We chased speed. We chased leverage. We chased tools that promised fewer interruptions and more output. And they delivered. Quietly, efficiently, relentlessly.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped noticing what disappeared. Conversations became messages. Presence became availability. Thinking out loud became thinking alone. We didn’t lose our teams. We optimized them out of our daily lives. And now an already lonely job feels emptier than it ever has.

The Sprint Toward Efficiency

Ever since COVID, the startup world has not just adopted remote work. We embraced it at full speed. Slack replaced hal...