Lev Learn
The concepts founders are expected to already know
Plain explanations of the terms that show up in pitch meetings, investor questions, and your own strategy documents — written for founders who would rather understand them than nod along.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
A description of the specific kind of customer your product serves best — precise enough that you can tell whether any given company or person qualifies.
TAM, SAM, and SOM
Three nested estimates of market size: everyone who could ever buy this kind of product (TAM), the portion you could realistically serve (SAM), and the portion you could plausibly win in the near term (SOM).
Bottom-Up Market Sizing
Estimating market size by starting from the unit you actually sell — number of customers times price — rather than by taking a slice of a published industry total.
Product-Market Fit
The point at which a product satisfies a real need for a specific market well enough that demand begins to pull the company along rather than the company pushing the product.
Design Partner
An early customer who commits to working closely with you while you build — giving real feedback and real usage in exchange for influence over the product and usually favorable terms.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
The total sales and marketing cost of acquiring one new customer, over a defined period.
CAC Payback Period
How long it takes for the gross profit from a customer to repay what you spent acquiring them.
Cohort Retention
The share of a group of users who started at the same time and are still active after a given period — measured per group rather than across the whole user base.
Competitive Moat
A structural reason your advantage survives a well-funded competitor deciding to copy you.
Burn Rate and Runway
Burn rate is how much cash you lose per month; runway is how many months of it you have left before the money runs out.
Segment vs. Persona
A segment is a group of organizations or people you can actually count and reach; a persona is a portrait of the individual inside that segment whose problem you are solving.
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)
A way of describing what a customer is trying to accomplish, independent of any product — on the premise that people do not buy products, they hire something to make progress on a problem.
Customer Discovery Interview
A conversation designed to learn what a potential customer actually does and struggles with — not to describe your product or ask whether they would buy it.
Leading Questions
Questions phrased so that the answer you hoped for is the easiest one to give — which makes the answer worthless as evidence.
Problem Validation vs. Solution Validation
Two separate tests: whether the problem is real and painful enough that people already do something about it, and whether your particular solution is one they would use and pay for.
Early Adopter
A customer who feels the problem acutely enough to accept an unfinished product — usually because they have already tried to solve it themselves.
Painkiller vs. Vitamin
A painkiller solves a problem someone is actively suffering from; a vitamin offers an improvement they agree would be nice. Painkillers get bought, vitamins get postponed.
Willingness to Pay
What a customer would actually hand over money for, as distinct from what they say a fair price would be.
User, Buyer, and Champion
Three roles that are often three different people: the one who uses the product daily, the one who controls the money, and the one who argues for it internally.
Beachhead Market
A deliberately narrow first market chosen because you can dominate it — not because it is the biggest, but because winning it makes the next market easier.
Churn
The rate at which customers stop paying you — counted either as customers lost (logo churn) or as revenue lost (revenue churn), which can differ sharply.
Pricing Models
The structure of how you charge — per user, per unit of usage, flat tiers, or some combination — as distinct from how much you charge.
Value-Based Pricing
Setting price from the value the customer receives rather than from what the product costs you to build and run.
Gross Margin
Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering the product, as a percentage of revenue — the share of each dollar left over to fund everything else.
Unit Economics
What it costs to acquire and serve one customer versus what that customer is worth — the question of whether the business works at the level of a single customer.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
The total gross profit you expect from a customer across their whole relationship with you — a projection, not a measurement.
Product-Led vs. Sales-Led Growth
Two ways customers arrive: the product sells itself through direct use (product-led), or people sell it through conversations (sales-led).
Positioning
The context you set for your product — what kind of thing it is, who it is for, and what it should be compared against.
ARR, MRR, and ACV
Three ways of counting recurring revenue: annualized run rate (ARR), the monthly equivalent (MRR), and the average value of one contract (ACV).
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
The smallest thing you can build that produces a real answer to the riskiest question about your business — not the smallest version of the product you intend to build.
Customer Advisory Board
A standing group of customers, convened on a regular cadence, who give structured feedback on roadmap and priorities in exchange for early visibility and influence over the product.
Switching Costs
The real money, time, risk, and retraining a customer would have to spend to leave your product for a competitor's — the thing that makes retention structural rather than a matter of ongoing goodwill.
Founder-Market Fit
The match between a founding team's specific unfair advantage — domain expertise, lived experience of the problem, or an unusual network — and the market they are building for.
Co-Founder Equity Split
How ownership of the company is divided among the founding team at the outset — a decision made with the least information a company will ever have about who contributes what.
Vesting and the Cliff
Vesting is earning equity gradually over time by staying with the company; the cliff is the initial period — usually one year — during which none of it vests, so someone who leaves early walks away with nothing.
The First Ten Hires
The small set of employees hired before the company has real process, whose individual judgment substitutes for the systems a larger company would use to catch their mistakes.
Vesting Acceleration (Single vs. Double Trigger)
A contract term that speeds up unvested equity vesting when a company is acquired — single trigger accelerates automatically on the acquisition itself, double trigger requires both the acquisition and the person's termination or demotion afterward.
Advisor Equity Grants
A small equity grant given to an advisor in exchange for ongoing, informal guidance — sized far below a co-founder or employee grant and vested over a shorter schedule.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
A goal-setting framework that pairs a qualitative Objective — what you want to be true — with a small number of measurable Key Results that define whether you got there.
Employee vs. Independent Contractor
The legal test that determines whether a worker must be treated as a payroll employee, with tax withholding and benefits obligations, or can be engaged as a self-directed independent contractor — and misclassifying someone exposes the company to back taxes and penalties.
Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A
The named stages of early venture financing, distinguished not by dollar amount but by what the company has proven and what the round is meant to buy.
SAFEs and Convertible Notes
Two instruments that let an investor put money in now and receive equity later, at a price set when a future priced round happens, instead of negotiating a valuation today.
Valuation Cap and Discount
The two mechanisms that determine how favorably an early investor's SAFE or note converts into equity relative to the price new investors pay in the priced round that triggers conversion.
Dilution
The reduction in each existing shareholder's percentage ownership that happens whenever a company issues new shares, whether from a new financing round or a new option pool.
Cap Table
The authoritative record of who owns what in a company — every founder, investor, and option holder, with share counts, security type, and percentage ownership.
Lead Investor and the Term Sheet
The lead investor is the firm that sets the terms of a round and typically writes its largest check; the term sheet is the document in which they propose those terms before legal work begins.
Investor Update
A regular, concise written report a founder sends to their investors covering key metrics, progress, and specific asks, independent of whether a board meeting is happening.
Bridge Round
A smaller, faster round — usually structured as a SAFE or convertible note — raised to extend a company's runway to the next milestone or the next full round, rather than to fund years of growth.
Down Round
A financing round priced at a lower valuation than the company's previous round, which dilutes existing shareholders more heavily than a flat or up round would.
Pro-Rata Rights
A contractual right letting an existing investor invest additional money in a future round to maintain their current percentage ownership, rather than being diluted by new investors alone.
Gross Burn vs. Net Burn
Gross burn is total cash spent in a month with revenue ignored; net burn subtracts what came in — and the gap between them is exactly the part of your runway that depends on revenue holding up.
Default Alive vs. Default Dead
A company is default alive if its current growth and spending trends reach profitability before the cash runs out without raising again; default dead if they do not.
Incorporation Basics and the 83(b) Election
Incorporating creates the legal entity that issues stock to founders; the 83(b) election is a filing, due within 30 days of receiving restricted stock, that lets founders pay tax on it now at its (typically negligible) current value instead of later as it vests and appreciates.
Delaware C-Corp vs. LLC
The Delaware C-corporation is the near-universal entity choice for venture-backed startups because it supports preferred stock, option pools, and the standardized deal structure investors expect; an LLC's pass-through taxation and flexible membership structure make it a poor fit for the same path.
IP Assignment Agreement
A signed agreement, from every founder, employee, and contractor who touches the product, assigning to the company any intellectual property they create in connection with the work — without it, the company may not actually own its own code and inventions.
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy Basics
The terms of service set the legal rules for using the product (liability limits, what users may and may not do, dispute handling); the privacy policy is a legally required disclosure of what personal data is collected and how it is used — both need to reflect what the product actually does, not a generic template.
Employee Stock Option Pool (ESOP)
A block of equity set aside, and typically expanded before each priced financing round, to grant stock options to current and future employees without renegotiating ownership every time someone is hired.
409A Valuation
An independent appraisal of a private company's common stock fair market value, required by IRS rules, that sets the minimum legal strike price for new stock option grants.
Board Meeting Cadence and Materials
The recurring rhythm of formal board meetings (typically monthly or quarterly at early stages) and the standing set of materials — metrics, financials, a narrative update — sent ahead of each one so the meeting is a discussion, not a first read.
Liquidation Preference
A term giving preferred shareholders (investors) the right to be paid a specified multiple of their investment back before common shareholders (founders and employees) receive anything from a sale or liquidation.
Messaging vs. Positioning
Positioning is the strategic claim about where you sit relative to alternatives; messaging is the specific words you use to make that claim land with a given audience.
Sales Pipeline Stages
The named, ordered steps a prospective deal moves through from first contact to closed — each stage defined by a specific action the prospect has taken, not by how the seller feels about the deal.
Channel Strategy
The deliberate choice of which paths — direct sales, self-serve, partnerships, marketplaces, resellers — you'll use to reach and sell to customers, made before spending on any of them.
Inbound vs. Outbound Sales
Inbound sales responds to prospects who found you and expressed interest first; outbound sales initiates contact with prospects who have not.
Land and Expand
A go-to-market strategy that deliberately sells a small initial deal to get inside an account, then grows the relationship — more seats, more usage, more departments — after the product has proven itself.
Sales Qualified Lead vs. Marketing Qualified Lead
An MQL has shown enough interest (downloaded something, attended a webinar, fit firmographic criteria) to be worth marketing's continued attention; an SQL has been vetted by a human as having a real, timely problem and budget, and is ready for a sales conversation.
Customer Success vs. Account Management
Customer success is measured by whether the customer achieves the outcome they bought the product for; account management is measured by the commercial health and growth of the account — renewal, upsell, contract terms.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
The percentage of revenue retained from an existing customer cohort over a period, including expansion and contraction, but excluding any revenue from new customers — above 100% means existing customers are growing your revenue even with zero new sales.
Board Observer Seat
A right, usually negotiated by an investor, to attend and receive materials for board meetings without holding a vote or fiduciary duty as a director.
Runway Extension Levers
The specific actions available to make cash last longer — cutting burn, raising a bridge, growing revenue, or renegotiating spend — evaluated for how much runway each buys and how fast it can be pulled.
Prototype vs. MVP
A prototype tests whether an idea is feasible or desirable without anyone actually using it for real work; an MVP is a real, usable product that tests the riskiest business assumption with real usage.
North Star Metric
The one metric that best captures the value your product delivers to customers, chosen so that moving it reliably means the business is getting healthier.
Activation
The point at which a new user first experiences the product's core value — not signing up, not logging in, but doing the specific thing that makes them understand why the product exists.
Feature Prioritization
The discipline of deciding what to build next using explicit, comparable criteria — rather than by whoever asked most recently or most loudly.
Differentiation
A specific, articulable way your product is different from the alternatives a customer would otherwise choose — distinct from a moat, which is whether that difference survives being copied.
Category Creation
Defining a new name and frame for a problem so customers evaluate you against a category you invented rather than against existing products doing something adjacent.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A single survey question — how likely are you to recommend this to a colleague, on a 0–10 scale — reduced to one score by subtracting the share of detractors (0–6) from the share of promoters (9–10).
Product Roadmap vs. Backlog
A roadmap communicates the sequenced themes and outcomes you intend to pursue and why; a backlog is the working inventory of every discrete piece of work that could feed into it, prioritized but not promised.
Technical Debt
The accumulated cost of past shortcuts in how the product was built — code that works today but makes every future change slower, riskier, or more expensive than it would be if built properly.
Data Privacy Basics (GDPR/CCPA)
The baseline legal obligations for handling personal data — what you may collect, why, how long you keep it, and what rights the person it describes has over it — set for EU residents by GDPR and for California residents by CCPA.
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Serial Entrepreneur
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