Every subculture develops its own jargon. In fact, often a good way to ascertain that something has gone on to become a well-established and unique subculture is to check if it has developed an argot or slang of its own. Where everyone within the subculture understands it, and those outside the will look completely nonplussed. Take the subculture of quizzing for example. Regular quizzers will not bat an eyelid at terms and phrases like ‘bounce’, ‘infinite pounce’, ‘Peter’, etc. Very often, people try their hardest to create new slang, because they instinctively understand the value it has in creating a subculture. One sees this very often on social media outlets such as Twitter, where people who want to be seen as influencers, or already are, constantly create new words and hashtags that they hope become part of the slang on the social network.
I have been talking of startups as a culture or a subculture often in these columns, without having paid too much attention to the jargon it should have developed if it were one. Doing this sort of an exercise is important because it will also tell you where the priorities of the subculture lie. In the case of startups, unsurprisingly, a lot of the jargon overwhelmingly tends to do with the process of raising money from investors. You have the ‘elevator pitch’, which is a short and persuasive sales pitch that takes as much time as an elevator ride. I am guessing that with more and more high-rises coming up, the lengths of these elevator pitches may also increase. You also have the ‘pitch deck’, which is a slightly more elaborate artefact that hopefully fills in some of the gaps that the elevator pitch could not. And then, you have jargon that deals with a whole lot of ‘metrics’ that go on those pitch decks. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), pronounced ‘cack’. LTV (Life Time Value). ‘Churn’, not what you do to get butter from curd, but the number of customers who are dropping off your product or service. GMV, which sounds like a cool car, but is actually ‘Gross Merchandise Value’, a metric, chasing which many startups have crashed and burned. Speaking of burning, there is also the ‘burn rate’, the rate at which your startup is spending the money it has.
Then there is also some jargon that centres on making startups seem cool, especially to potential employees. This often boils down to fancy job titles. ‘Growth hacker’ being a very common one. Contrary to what the dictionary meaning may suggest, this person, who often does not code or hack in the geek sense either, is not meant to cut into the growth of the startup, but help it grow faster. ‘Hustler’ is one more. But they do not expect you to be Larry Flynt. You will see things like ‘evangelist’, ‘gardener’, ‘Sherpa’, etc. all turn up in job titles, with none of them meaning what they do in real life.
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In conclusion, while startups are definitely a subculture, it is one that is obsessed with raising money and maybe creating a few fancy new job descriptions, at least going by the jargon it uses most often.
In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. The writer heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace