The Startup Glossary Nobody Gave You
A translation guide for the things you’ll hear on the way in, inside, and on the way out.
15 years of early stage work means I have been inside a lottt of startups.
I have sat in a lot of meetings. Listened to a lot of all-hands. Nodded along to a lot of phrases that sounded completely reasonable in the moment and revealed themselves (slowly) to mean something else entirely.
This is not a cynical piece. (I promise.) It’s a love letter to the gap between intention and reality. Most founders mean what they say. They’re just moving fast, under pressure, with more optimism than infrastructure. And that gap? That gap is where I live.
So. In the spirit of public service. Here is your glossary.
On Getting Hired
“We set clear expectations here.” Translation: We will set them. Eventually. Once we figure out what we’re actually building. In the meantime, please read the room.
“We’re looking for someone scrappy.” Translation: We need one person to write the strategy, execute the strategy, measure the strategy, and report back on the strategy. No, there is no budget. Yes, we expect results.
“It’s a fast-paced environment.” Translation: Everything is urgent. All the time. There is no prioritization system because prioritization would require us to admit we cannot do everything at once, and we are not ready to do that.
“We’re a family here.” Translation: We care deeply about each other. We will also, when things go sideways, discover exactly who is family and who is staff. (Hint: it becomes clear very fast.)
“We really value work-life balance.” Translation: We truly mean this. Except during crunch time. We are always in crunch time. But other than that… totally serious about the balance thing.
On What the Team Actually Needs
“The team just needs to be more proactive.” Translation: They don’t know what they own. They are tired of guessing wrong. They have guessed wrong enough times that guessing now feels dangerous.
“I need them to take more ownership.” Translation: No one has defined ownership. So everything is everyone’s responsibility. Which means, practically speaking, nothing is anyone’s responsibility.
“They’re not executing.” Translation: There is no clear plan. There are no clear priorities. There is no agreed-upon definition of done. But yes, the execution is the problem.
“I don’t want to micromanage.” Translation: I have avoided defining expectations. I am now managing chaos instead of people. I do not yet see the connection between these two things.
“They should already know this.” Translation: No one taught it. It is not written down anywhere. It lives, exclusively, in the founder’s brain.
On Communication
“We’ll circle back to that.” Translation: We will not circle back to that. Ten other things have happened since this meeting started. No one has been assigned ownership of the original thing. The circle is open. It will remain open.
“We just need better communication.” Translation: We have no communication system. We have Slack and vibes. The vibes are not doing great.
“Our dashboard lives in this sheet.” Translation: It lives in a Google Sheet called TEAM KPIs FINAL_v4. One person knows how to read it. That person is currently on PTO. We will not be updating the sheet while they are gone because we do not know how.
“That’s documented in Notion.” Translation: It was documented in Notion. In February. Notion helpfully tells me it has not been touched since. New hires do not know it exists. Existing employees forgot to check it after week two. But it IS there, and that matters to us.
On the Product
“The product is strong. We just need to tell the story better.” Translation: The product is confusing, inconsistent, or not yet delivering value fast enough. Buut the story is easier to fix than the product, so we are starting there.
“This is a quick fix.” Translation: This is a systemic issue wearing a trench coat and pretending to be a feature request.
“We’re close.” Translation: We are not close. We are unclear. Close and unclear feel similar from the inside. They are not the same.
“Once we ship this, things will unlock.” Translation: We are pinning operational problems on a future feature. The feature will ship. The problems will remain. We will identify the next thing that will unlock everything.
“Engineering just needs to move faster.” Translation: Priorities are shifting constantly and no one is protecting the team’s focus. But yes. Faster. That’s the thing.
On Strategy
“We just need to tighten execution.” Translation: There is no agreed-upon strategy to execute against. But execution sounds more fixable than strategy, so we are starting there.
“We’re aligned.” Translation: Everyone in the room is using the same words. No one means the same thing. This will become apparent later, at the worst possible moment, usually in front of a client.
“We just need to tighten up our processes.” Translation: We do not have processes. We have habits, and some of the habits are bad, and we have decided to call them processes so that fixing them feels more manageable.
On Clients
“We can absolutely do that.” Translation: We cannot currently do that. We are going to figure out how to do that after this call. We believe we will figure it out. We are optimists. This is both our greatest strength and the reason our ops team is aging rapidly.
A Note From the Field
None of these phrases are malicious. I want to be really clear about that.
They come from founders and leaders who are building something that didn’t exist before, moving faster than any system can keep up with, and genuinely trying to do right by their people. The gap between what gets said and what’s actually happening isn’t dishonesty. It’s the space between intention and infrastructure.
That gap is fixable.
It just requires someone willing to stand in it, look around, and say, “Okay. Let’s talk about what’s actually going on here.”
That’s the work I do. And if any of these translations hit a little close to home today, my DMs are open.
See you in the wild.
-KB
“We’re a family here” = run for the hills
The "be more proactive" entry is painfully accurate. When I audit £500K–£2M professional services firms, the pattern I see isn't a motivation problem — it's a decision-rights problem dressed up as a culture problem. People have taken action, it's gone the wrong way, they've been quietly corrected, and now they wait. One accountancy founder I worked with had a team of 9 who'd collectively stopped making any decision above £500 without her approval. She called it a capability issue. It was a criteria issue — nobody had been told what "good" looked like. The fix wasn't training. It was writing down the five decisions the team could own outright, with explicit guardrails. Took a week. Freed up 8 hours of her time.