This book will make you sound like a Silicon Valley insider

Photo credit: Pexels.

When I first started writing about startups, I had no clue about aggregators and unicorns, acqui-hires and down rounds. Five minutes into a conversation, a VC or an entrepreneur would know I was a newbie in this cool, geeky world. I didn’t fit in.

If only I had this book Valley Speak in my hands then! It would’ve given me the lingo that’s a passport into Silicon Valley and every other startup hub that loves to ape the Valley culture. I wouldn’t have had to keep interrupting people to ask what they meant.

Rochelle Kopp, an MBA who heads an intercultural consulting firm for Japanese businesses, and her husband Steven Ganz, a Valley entrepreneur with a Ph D in computer science, initially wrote the book in Japanese last year. Titled Silicon Valley Buzzwords, it was meant for Japanese firms and investors facing linguistic barriers in doing business in the Valley. Soon it became apparent to the authors that it was a problem all outsiders faced, even if they were English speaking, because the startup world has its own jargon, from casual ones like ‘break shit’ to more serious stuff like the 2016 buzzword ‘unicorpses’.

So now we have it in English – Valley Speak: Deciphering the Jargon of Silicon Valley – published this month. Along with the jargon, however, you get a sense of startup culture and how it’s evolving.

Many of the words may already be familiar to you, depending on how much of an insider you’ve become. But the book’s organized in such a way that it lets you dive into sections like ‘funding’ or ‘marketing’ and specific terms such as ‘Internet of Value’ and ‘SoLoMo’.

It can be fun and enlightening to go over the familiar words too, to see if our understanding of it matches that of Valley pundits. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, for example, defines a startup as “a company designed to grow fast.” On the other hand , Rafat Ali, founder of Skift, has given up trying to define it: “We stopped calling ourselves a ‘startup’, a meaningless word that comes with too much baggage.” Quotes like that and a bit of history accompanying the description of each term sharpen our thoughts.

The etymology of the word ‘entrepreneur’ comes from French where it was mostly used to describe an adventurer. In that spirit, Napster founder Sean Parker says it well in this quote: “Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you’re going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren’t quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.” Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, has a more practical description: “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something.”

The 3-year-old unicorn

Valley Speak tells us that Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee first popularized the term ‘unicorn’ as recently as November 2013. Since then, it has become a status symbol to reach US$1 billion valuation and be called a unicorn. But as winter sets in for startup funding, attention has now shifted to which of them will turn into bloated ‘unicorpses’.

It’s not a book that will make you a master of ‘customer acquisition cost’ or ‘vesting cliffs’ or any of the other bells and whistles of being an entrepreneur. But it’s a good starting point for getting up to speed on the buzzwords currently doing the rounds in the protean world of startups. Then it will require further study to be able to walk the walk, and not just talk the talk.