What’s New

Recent changes to Tech Startup Patterns.

2026-06-25

What’s New

• New article: Net Revenue Retention — how SaaS founders and investors read expansion, churn, and revenue quality across existing customer cohorts.
• New article: Marketing-Sourced vs. Marketing-Influenced Pipeline — separating demand creation from deal influence so attribution claims support better budget, forecast, and diligence decisions.
• Improved: Candidate Discovery in the Age of AI Screening — clearer on how AI screening ranks and buries applications, with a sharper referral-first path through the startup hiring funnel.
• Improved: Pipeline Review Cadence — tighter rhythm, with the review/forecast distinction and deal-inspection mechanics easier to scan.
• Improved: Dilution — a faster opening and more direct cap-table mechanics, with sourcing, examples, and relationships unchanged.
• Improved: The Experience-and-Age Paradox — the age-bias evidence, founder/investor/talent implications, and warm-path consequence are easier to scan.

Metrics

• Total articles: 107
• Coverage: 107 of 109 proposed concepts written (98%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 4

2026-06-20

What’s New

• New article: Pipeline Forecasting — how sales-led startups turn active opportunities into commit, best-case, and downside bookings scenarios.
• New article: Pipeline Review Cadence — the recurring deal-inspection meeting that turns CRM pipeline into an accountable forecast a founder can defend deal by deal.
• Improved: Network Effect — a tighter entry that more cleanly separates real network effects from referral loops, local from global effects, and data feedback loops from ordinary data accumulation.
• Improved: Investment Thesis — a clearer first paragraph, tighter fund-fit framing for founders and emerging managers, and source links for the canonical USV and a16z thesis examples.
• Improved: Portfolio Construction — leads with its core idea and reads tighter throughout, sharpening how a fund’s power-law math explains why a good business can still be the wrong-sized bet.
• Improved: Venture Capital Fund Structure — a sharper opening that lands the thesis fast and roughly a third less length, with all the fund economics intact.
• Improved: Pipeline Hygiene — clearer CRM evidence rules, stage-gate discipline, and stalled-deal exits.

Metrics

• Total articles: 105
• Coverage: 105 of 106 proposed concepts written (99%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 6

2026-06-18

What’s New

• New article: Pipeline Hygiene — the operating discipline that keeps CRM opportunities accurate enough for coverage, velocity, forecasts, and hiring plans to mean anything.
• Improved: Value Proposition — sharper opening, cleaner status-quo test, and clearer economics caveat.
• Improved: Zero to One — tighter sentences and cleaner source links without changing the substance.
• Improved: 7 Powers — shorter opening, clearer durability framing, and tighter counter-positioning and AI-defensibility examples.
• Improved: The Mom Test — clearer rhythm and a sharper commitment-and-advancement distinction for customer discovery interviews.
• Improved: A Note to Practitioners — faster legal, financial, tax, and investment-advice boundary.
• Improved: Blue Ocean Strategy — cleaner ERRC wording and tighter talent and investor framing.
• Improved: Defensibility — cleaner moat explanation, a sharper copy-this test, and more current AI-era source support.
• Improved: Due Diligence — tighter opening, cleaner founder-readiness framing, and concrete cited sources for data-room, legal-document, and reverse-diligence practice.

Metrics

• Total articles: 103
• Coverage: 103 of 104 proposed concepts written (99%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 8

2026-06-16

What’s New

• New article: Sales Capacity Planning — the bottom-up model that ties reps, quota, ramp, and attainment to a revenue target, and how to tell whether a hiring plan can actually carry the number.
• Improved: Sales Velocity — tighter, clearer prose.
• Improved: Jobs to Be Done — shorter sentences and cleaner punctuation for rhythm and readability, same substance.
• Improved: The Mom Test — a tighter customer-discovery example.
• Improved: Value Proposition — sharper, more readable sentences without changing the substance.
• Improved: Effectuation — tighter, more readable prose.
• Improved: Entrepreneurial Alertness — sharper, more skimmable prose without changing the substance.
• Improved: Knightian Uncertainty — sharper sentence rhythm and easier reading, with no change to its claims or sources.

Metrics

• Total articles: 102
• Coverage: 102 of 103 proposed concepts written (99%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 8

2026-06-15

What’s New

• Improved: MEDDIC Qualification — a sharper opening that ties the qualification test to the buyer, the pain, and the champion, with cleaner figure formatting.
• Improved: Mutual Action Plan — a tighter Solution and a distinct worked example so the pattern reads independently of the related MEDDIC entry.
• Improved: Pipeline Coverage Ratio — tighter prose and a new cross-link to MEDDIC Qualification.
• Improved: Product-Led Growth — a tighter opening and cleaner sentence rhythm, with the Slack and Figma examples and the freemium-cost warning intact.
• Improved: Sales Velocity — concrete, non-repetitive operating-diagnosis guidance, with each of the four inputs mapped to a distinct fix and to the worked example’s numbers.
• Improved: Beachhead Market — sharper sentence rhythm and easier skimming.
• Improved: Differentiation Strategy — sharper rhythm and a more conversational voice.
• Improved: AI-Driven Idea Validation — cleaner sentence flow and rhythm.
• Improved: Creative Destruction — cleaner punctuation and sentence rhythm, with all examples and sources intact.

Metrics

• Total articles: 101
• Coverage: 101 of 103 proposed concepts written (98%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 9

2026-06-14

What’s New

• New article: Mutual Action Plan — how buyer-owned milestones turn complex enterprise opportunities into dated commitments instead of optimistic CRM stage labels.
• Improved: Liquidation Preference — a faster opening and a cleaner explanation of how the preference stack, participation, and exit waterfall decide whether common stock sees proceeds in a sale.
• Improved: The Bullseye Framework — crisper channel-testing prose and a clearer view of why a winning growth channel is temporary.
• Improved: Runway — tighter prose, a dated 2025 benchmark for 24 to 30 months of runway, and specific sources for fundraising-timing guidance.
• Improved: The Down Round and Structured Financing — a faster opening and a clearer split between headline valuation and structure-adjusted cost.
• Improved: CAC Payback Period — a faster opening and clearer explanation of the cash-timing burden behind customer acquisition.
• Improved: The Fat Startup — a cleaner two-condition test for when heavy spending buys durable advantage rather than becoming premature scaling.

Metrics

• Total articles: 101
• Coverage: 101 of 104 proposed concepts written (97%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 6

2026-06-10

What’s New

• New article: MEDDIC Qualification — how to decide whether an enterprise sales opportunity is real, funded, winnable, and closeable before it enters the forecast.
• Improved: Revenue Model Selection — clearer treatment of how the capture mechanism changes buyer friction, investor story, margin profile, and the ability to stack models later.
• Improved: Sector-Specific Regulatory Risk — a sharper early read on when regulation is a product and formation constraint, with clearer founder, investor, and talent signals.
• Improved: Solo Founder Viability — cleaner separation between solo building and solo fundraising, with AI-era revenue evidence named and caveated.
• Improved: The Bridge Round and Signaling Risk — a tighter distinction between bridge extensions and insider participation signals.
• Improved: Founding Team Composition — a sharper early test for whether a startup needs a co-founder, a hire, a contractor, or AI tooling to close its real capability gap.
• Improved: Four-Year Vesting with One-Year Cliff — a cleaner first-read explanation of when equity becomes the holder’s to keep, with tighter treatment of cliffs, back-vesting, acceleration, and post-termination exercise windows.
• Improved: Startup Legal Formation — a tighter venture-track formation default, with clearer boundaries around Delaware C-Corp, IP assignment, founder vesting, and 83(b) mechanics.
• Improved: Capital Efficiency — a sharper post-2022 fundraising lens and a cleaner explanation of how burn multiple, Rule of 40, CAC payback, and durable revenue fit together.
• Improved: Burn Rate — a faster opening and a cleaner test for whether cash burn is projected, net, milestone-linked, and worth the runway it consumes.

Metrics

• Total articles: 100
• Coverage: 100 of 102 proposed concepts written (98%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 9

2026-06-07

What’s New

• New article: Sales Velocity — how qualified pipeline turns into revenue over time, and which input slows the sales engine down.
• New article: CAC Payback Period — how long a new customer takes to repay acquisition cost, and why a healthy CAC/LTV ratio can still leave the company carrying too much cash timing risk.
• Improved: Theory of the Firm — a faster explanation of Coase’s transaction-cost frame and a cleaner way to read AI-era firm boundaries.
• Improved: Founder Mode — a cleaner line between valuable founder closeness and bottleneck behavior that makes the company slower, more dependent, and harder to scale.
• Improved: Founder-Market Fit — sharper distinctions between founder-to-market signal and product-market fit, with clearer diagnostics for access, fluency, insider bias, and investor diligence.

Metrics

• Total articles: 99
• Coverage: 99 of 100 proposed concepts written (99%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 3

2026-06-07

What’s New

• New article: Design Partner Program — how to structure early-customer co-development so it produces learning, commitment, and conversion signal rather than a comfortable false positive.
• New article: Pipeline Coverage Ratio — how qualified sales pipeline tests whether a sales-led forecast has enough real opportunity behind it.
• Improved: Co-Founder Equity Split — a faster opening and a cleaner way to weigh equal versus differentiated ownership while treating vesting as the main protection.
• Improved: Cap Table Hygiene — a faster opening and a clearer view of why small ownership-record lapses become expensive diligence problems at the term-sheet moment.
• Improved: Diversity and Capital Access — a cleaner read on how funding access becomes financing math rather than a moral slogan, for founders, investors, and startup talent alike.

Metrics

• Total articles: 97
• Coverage: 97 of 97 proposed concepts written (100%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 3

2026-06-06

What’s New

• Improved: The Cascading Miracles Trap — clearer chain-risk math and a sharper test for business models that need too many hard bets to land in sequence.
• Improved: Bad Bedfellows — a faster opening and a cleaner way to spot and contain misaligned co-founders, investors, and partners before the relationship consumes the company.
• Improved: False Positive Trap — sharper separation between early enthusiasm and broad-market demand, with Fab.com replacing the weaker Better Place case.
• Improved: Premature Scaling — a faster opening, cleaner Startup Genome evidence, and a sharper distinction between earned scale and growth bought before fit is real.
• Improved: The Help Wanted Trap — a tighter explanation of the late-stage resource constraint, using Dot & Bo and the senior-hiring gap to show how demand can stall without the right capacity.
• Improved: Pilot Purgatory — a faster opening and a cleaner distinction between engaged enterprise pilots and qualified sales opportunities that can become revenue.
• Improved: Bootstrapping Mechanics — a tighter explanation of how revenue-funded companies use ramen profitability, revenue-first forecasting, small-team discipline, and default-alive checks.
• Improved: Speed Trap — a faster opening and a cleaner read on the difference between real demand and growth that has become too expensive to sustain.
• Improved: Accelerator vs. Bootstrapping Decision — current published accelerator terms and a cleaner test for when network and signal are worth the early dilution.

Metrics

• Total articles: 95
• Coverage: 95 of 95 proposed concepts written (100%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 9

2026-06-06

What’s New

• New article: Founder-Market Fit — how to read the pre-product match between a founder and a market, and why it is not the same signal as product-market fit.
• New article: Founder Mode — when direct founder involvement sharpens a startup and when the same behavior turns into a bottleneck.
• New article: The Bridge Round and Signaling Risk — when bridge financing buys credible time and when insider behavior turns it into a distress signal.
• Improved: Acquisition Exit — crisper prose that makes deal structure, waterfall payout, and earn-out risk easier to scan.
• Improved: IPO vs. Acquisition Decision — a sharper, shorter framework for testing the public-market threshold before choosing between a sale and life as a public company.
• Improved: Tender Offer — a faster opening, cleaner distinctions from direct secondaries and continuation vehicles, and a clearer seller decision.

Metrics

• Total articles: 95
• Coverage: 95 of 95 proposed concepts written (100%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 3

2026-06-06

What’s New

• New article: Sector-Specific Regulatory Risk — why fintech, healthcare, AI, crypto, and other regulated-sector startups must treat regulation as a product-design, formation, and diligence constraint before the first major commitment.
• New article: Blue Ocean Strategy — value innovation, the strategy canvas, the ERRC questions, and the investor test for whether an uncontested market can stay uncontested.
• New article: Diversity and Capital Access — how gender, race, investor networks, fund structure, check size, and 2025 DEI policy headwinds shape who can reach venture capital and on what terms.
• Improved: The AI Wrapper Trap — a clearer opening, a short explanation of the wrapper term, and a repaired Menlo Ventures source link with the report’s 2025 enterprise-AI data.
• Improved: Lean Team Economics — cleaner prose and a more precise Revelio Labs data point on shrinking Series A team size.
• Improved: Data Moat — sharper current-source support for the model-layer commoditization argument and a cleaner test for when proprietary data actually defends an AI startup.
• Improved: The One-Person Company Frontier — the current Medvi boundary case and a sharper test for whether a tiny AI-enabled company is truly solo, merely lean, or riding on hidden partner infrastructure.
• Improved: Scrappy Distribution for Bootstrappers — a more concrete no-budget channel order, added manual founder outreach, and a Nomad List case grounded in primary source material.
• Improved: Vibe Revenue — a clearer opening, cleaner durability language, and a lower-friction explanation of why fast AI run-rate revenue can still fail the renewal test.

Metrics

• Total articles: 92
• Coverage: 92 of 96 proposed concepts written (96%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 6

2026-05-29

What’s New

• Improved: Go-to-Market Motion — broke up dense single-cadence paragraphs into a more varied, skimmable rhythm and cleared punctuation clutter, so the three-motion distinction and the price-to-motion heuristic read faster.
• Improved: The Chasm — a tighter lede, cleaner sentence rhythm, and a clearer split between the two kinds of buyer and the circular-reference trap that defines the gap.
• Improved: The Cold Start Problem — broke up the long, dense sentences for cleaner rhythm and a faster read, with every named case (Tinder, Uber, Google Plus) and the five-stage framework intact.
• Improved: The Lean Startup Loop — broke up the long, dense sentences in the Consequences section for cleaner rhythm and a faster read, with the Dropbox pre-build waitlist test and the build-measure-learn loop diagram intact.
• Improved: Pivot — tighter prose and rhythm throughout.

Metrics

• Total articles: 89
• Coverage: 89 of 95 proposed concepts written (94%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 5

2026-05-29

What’s New

• New article: The Down Round and Structured Financing — how a “flat” round can hide a markdown, and the recap, pay-to-play, and “dirty” term-sheet mechanics that decide what a valuation is really worth.
• Improved: Disruptive Innovation — a tighter opening, two long sentences broken for easier reading, and a clearer close on what really decides a disruption.
• Improved: Minimum Viable Product — broke up its longest sentence, smoothed the Dropbox and Zappos examples, and tightened the wording for an easier read.
• Improved: CAC/LTV Ratio — broke up a dense run of long sentences in the three-readers explanation and untangled a run-on in the Liabilities list for a faster read.
• Improved: Aggregation Theory — broke up dense paragraphs into a more varied, skimmable rhythm and trimmed punctuation clutter so the platform-versus-aggregator distinction and the Netflix limit read faster.

Metrics

• Total articles: 89
• Coverage: 89 of 95 proposed concepts written (94%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 4

2026-05-29

What’s New

• New article: Tender Offer — how founders and early employees turn private shares into cash through a company-run secondary sale, the liquidity path most venture-backed shareholders now reach before any acquisition or IPO.
• New article: The Fat Startup — when deliberately spending big to win a market is the right call, and when it is just premature scaling in disguise.
• New antipattern: Vibe Revenue — how a fast-climbing AI run-rate can be experimental trial budget rather than durable demand, why gross retention (not growth rate) is now the question that gates AI-startup diligence, and how to convert trials into revenue that renews.
• Improved: Product-Market Fit — tighter prose and cleaner reading throughout.
• Improved: Unit Economics — sharper, more skimmable prose.

Metrics

• Total articles: 88
• Coverage: 88 of 92 proposed concepts written (96%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 2

2026-05-29

What’s New

• New article: Early-Stage Talent Sourcing — the channel order that actually fills early roles when a startup has no brand, no recruiter, and no reputation, and the outreach volume the math requires.
• New article: Fractional Executives and Contractor Talent — how a startup buys senior capability by the day instead of by the full-time hire, and the IP-assignment and worker-classification traps that decide whether the arrangement holds.
• New article: The Experience-and-Age Paradox — why founder-performance data rewards experience while funding and hiring funnels discount founders at both ends of the age range.
• New article: Speed Trap — how a startup that finds real demand can break itself by scaling at all costs to win a land grab, just as the conditions that made early growth fast invite the competition and rising costs that sink the economics.
• Improved: Convertible Note — tighter prose and clearer sentence rhythm throughout.
• Improved: Fundraising Timing — a tightened opening so the core idea lands in the first sentence.
• Improved: Burn Multiple — cut a filler word and split its densest sentence so the worked example reads cleaner.

Metrics

• Total articles: 85
• Coverage: 85 of 91 proposed concepts written (93%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 3

2026-05-29

What’s New

• New article: Founding Team Composition — how to build a founding team around the capability gaps your specific business has rather than the skills you and your co-founders happen to share, including how AI tooling has changed the size question.
• New article: Solo Founder Viability — whether to start a company alone or with co-founders, and why AI tooling has reopened a question venture orthodoxy had treated as settled against the solo path.
• New article: Theory of the Firm — Coase’s transaction-cost answer to why companies employ anyone at all, and why AI lowering coordination costs is the economic engine pushing startups toward smaller, leaner teams.
• New article: Hiring Sequence and the First-Hire Decision — when to make the first hire and how to order the ones after it, and why AI raising what one founder can cover has pushed the “hire early” threshold later than the conventional wisdom assumes.
• New article: Lean Team Economics — why AI-native startups now hit the same revenue milestones with far smaller teams, what the compute bill does to that saving, and how founders, investors, and joiners each read the shift.
• New article: The One-Person Company Frontier — how AI is letting single founders reach scales that once needed a team, and the honest line between a high-revenue solo business and a venture-backable one.
• Improved: Term Sheet Mechanics — a tighter, faster read that lands the two-negotiations idea (money and power) up front, with the same FanDuel case and the same term-by-term breakdown.
• Improved: SAFE Note — the core insight (a SAFE is a sale that postpones the count, not a loan that postpones the math) now leads the page, and the prose reads tighter.

Metrics

• Total articles: 81
• Coverage: 81 of 89 proposed concepts written (91%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 2

2026-05-27

What’s New

• New article: AI-Driven Idea Validation — how to use AI to compress the desk-research side of validation (market sizing, competitor maps, personas) without mistaking its speed for evidence that real customers will pay.
• New article: Beachhead Market — how to pick one tightly bounded initial segment, dominate it completely, and expand from that owned position, with the fundraising and investor lenses on the choice.
• New article: Creative Destruction — Schumpeter’s account of how innovation destroys old economic structures and builds new ones, and the parent theory beneath disruptive innovation.
• New article: Differentiation Strategy — how to choose the one axis your startup can be durably different on (technology, distribution, data, brand, workflow), make it last against a fast follower, and state it so an investor can underwrite it; the bridge from value proposition to defensibility.
• New article: Effectuation — how expert founders reason from the means they already control instead of from a fixed goal and a forecast, and the four principles (affordable loss, bird in hand, lemonade, crazy quilt) that make the mode concrete.
• New article: Entrepreneurial Alertness — Israel Kirzner’s account of the founder as the alert discoverer of opportunities that already exist, and the discovery-versus-creation question that sits underneath how you shape and pitch an idea.
• New article: Jobs to Be Done — the demand-side theory that customers “hire” a product to get a job done, and how that reframes who your real competition is and which needs are worth building for.
• New article: Knightian Uncertainty — the difference between measurable risk and the genuine, unpriceable uncertainty that entrepreneurial profit is paid for, read for founders, investors, and startup talent.
• New article: The Mom Test — how to run customer-discovery interviews that get evidence instead of compliments by asking about real past behavior, never about hypothetical future enthusiasm.
• New article: Value Proposition — the precise statement of why a specific customer chooses your product over every alternative, including doing nothing, and the seed filter investors read first.
• New article: Zero to One — Peter Thiel’s monopoly-and-secrets thesis at venture scale, and the contrarian-truth filter investors actually apply.
• New article: Accelerator vs. Bootstrapping Decision — how to read the trade between an accelerator’s network and signal at a fixed equity cost and funding growth from revenue, with the named programs’ standard terms and the situations where each path wins.
• New article: Bootstrapping Mechanics — the operating discipline of a revenue-funded company, defining ramen profitability and the default-alive / default-dead test, and how founders forecast from revenue and pace hiring without a round.
• New article: Cap Table Hygiene — keeping the capitalization table clean and fully-diluted from day one, the four practices that hold it together (paper every grant, track every SAFE and note on a fully-diluted basis, size the option pool deliberately, vest the founders early), and why a messy table is cheap to prevent and expensive to fix at the worst possible moment — the Series A diligence call.
• New article: Co-Founder Equity Split — how a founding team divides equity, the equal-vs-differentiated debate, and why vesting matters more than the percentages.
• New article: Four-Year Vesting with One-Year Cliff — the standard 48-month/12-month-cliff equity schedule, how the cliff and back-vesting work, double-trigger acceleration, and the post-termination exercise window, for founders structuring grants, employees reading an offer, and investors reading the table.
• New article: Revenue Model Selection — how a startup chooses to capture value (subscription, usage, take-rate, marketplace, licensing, services, or advertising) and how that choice shapes its fundraising story, margins, and defensibility.
• New article: Startup Legal Formation — the Delaware C-Corp default, IP assignment, founder vesting, and the 83(b) election that make a US startup fundable, and the formation mistakes that surface expensively at diligence.
• New article: Disruptive Innovation — what Clayton Christensen’s term actually means, how overlooked-segment entrants topple incumbents from below, and why most products called “disruptive” are not.
• New article: Minimum Viable Product — why an MVP is a learning instrument, not a cheap first product, and how to build the smallest thing that answers one real question about your customers.
• New article: Pivot — what a pivot actually is (a structured change of strategy on validated learning), the ten named types from the Lean Startup, and how to tell a warranted pivot from thrashing or stalling.
• New article: Product-Market Fit — what the phrase actually means, why its leading definitions diverge, and how to tell real fit from its convincing imitation.
• New article: Scrappy Distribution for Bootstrappers — the distribution playbook for a startup with no ad budget, no brand, and no team: win intent-driven channels first, amplify with authenticity, treat paid acquisition as the last resort.
• New article: The Chasm — Geoffrey Moore’s structural gap between the early adopters who buy on vision and the early majority who buy only proven, referenceable products, why crossing it stalls so many startups, and the bounded-beachhead strategy for getting across.
• New article: The Cold Start Problem — the chicken-and-egg bind facing every network product (no value without users, no users without value), Andrew Chen’s five-stage framework, and how Tinder, Uber, and others seeded their first networks one atomic cell at a time.
• New article: The Lean Startup Loop — how to run build-measure-learn as a real cycle, with the persevere-or-pivot decision and a pre-set kill threshold as the step that earns its keep.
• New article: Burn Rate — how to read the speed a startup spends cash, the gross-vs-net distinction, the 2025–2026 benchmarks by stage, and how burn, runway, and the fundraising clock move together.
• New article: Capital Efficiency — how much durable revenue growth a startup buys per dollar burned, and why this lens (burn multiple, Rule of 40, CAC payback) replaced growth-at-all-costs after 2022.
• New article: Convertible Note — the debt instrument the SAFE replaced, and the interest rate and maturity date a SAFE-trained founder is most likely to miss.
• New article: Fundraising Timing — when to begin a raise relative to runway and milestones, and why starting early enough to walk away is what sets the terms.
• New article: Liquidation Preference — the investor’s right to be paid first in a sale, the multiple-and-participation mechanics, and how it decides whether an exit pays the team anything.
• New article: Runway — how to turn a bank balance into a deadline, when to start raising against it, and why 2025–2026 rounds are sized for 24–30 months.
• New article: SAFE Note — how Y Combinator’s standard pre-seed instrument actually converts, why the post-money form puts the dilution on the founder, and the cap-table math first-timers misread.
• New article: Term Sheet Mechanics — the document that sets a priced round’s economics and its control terms, and where founders give away the company by reading only the valuation line.
• New article: Aggregation Theory — how value accrues on the internet to whoever owns the demand-side user relationship, the platform-vs-aggregator distinction (the Bill Gates Line), and how to tell a real aggregator from a business that just has scale.
• New article: Burn Multiple — net burn divided by net new ARR, the single number investors reach for to judge whether a startup’s growth is being earned or bought, with the post-2022 threshold bands and how to read it honestly.
• New article: CAC/LTV Ratio — how to read the customer-value-to-acquisition-cost ratio honestly, why the 3:1 floor is not the 3.6:1 target, and the gross-margin correction that turns an inflated 4:1 into a real 2:1.
• New article: Go-to-Market Motion — the repeatable engine by which a company finds, converts, and retains customers (product-led, sales-led, or marketing-led), and how price and buyer dictate which one fits.
• New article: Product-Led Growth — how a product becomes its own sales engine through free trials, self-serve onboarding, and viral loops, and the conditions under which that compounds versus quietly burns cash.
• New article: The Bullseye Framework — the systematic method for finding the single distribution channel that drives a startup’s breakthrough growth, by testing the whole field cheaply before concentrating on the winner.
• New article: Unit Economics — the per-customer revenue and cost breakdown (CAC, LTV, payback, margin) that tells you whether a business actually makes money at scale or only looks like it does, with 2025–2026 benchmarks and the MoviePass cautionary case.
• New article: 7 Powers — Hamilton Helmer’s taxonomy of the seven structural sources of durable advantage, the precise vocabulary beneath the word “moat.”
• New article: Defensibility — what actually stops a competitor from copying your business, the named moat types, and how the 2025–2026 AI shift moved durable advantage from technology toward proprietary data.
• New article: Due Diligence — the structured investigation an investor runs before wiring the money, what it inspects across team, financials, cap table, and legal, what founders should have ready, and why the riskiest moment in a raise is the gap between the signed term sheet and the closed round.
• New article: Investment Thesis — what a fund’s stated rule for what it backs (stage, sector, check size, return profile) actually is, why a good business can be a clean “not a fit” pass, and how to read a thesis before you pitch.
• New article: Network Effect — what a network effect actually is (and isn’t), the three types, why investors pay a premium for it, and how to tell a real one from a growth story.
• New article: Portfolio Construction — the arithmetic of how a venture fund sizes its bets to survive a power law where one outlier returns the whole fund, and why that math, not taste, explains investors passing on good businesses.
• New article: Venture Capital Fund Structure — how a fund’s limited-partnership form, 2-and-20 economics, and ten-year clock explain investor behavior that founders usually read as personality.
• New article: Candidate Discovery in the Age of AI Screening — how to reach a startup when both the screening and the resume are AI-mediated, and why referrals and a standalone portfolio still beat the application funnel.
• New article: Dilution — how an ownership percentage shrinks every time the company issues shares, the four events that drive it (rounds, the option-pool shuffle, SAFE/note conversion, down-round ratchets), and how to read a cap table forward so a 1% grant is sized for what it becomes, not what it says today.
• New article: Equity Compensation Types — the four ways startups grant equity (ISOs, NSOs, RSUs, ESPPs), what each costs you in taxes and when, and the AMT trap that can turn an option grant into a bill for shares you never sold.
• New article: Startup Equity Evaluation — how to read a startup equity offer for what it is actually worth, the five questions that turn a headline grant into a probability-weighted number, and the common ways an offer obscures its true value.
• New article: Total Compensation Architecture — the employer-side framework for designing and pricing a startup offer (salary band, equity grant, benefits, and the cash-for-equity tradeoff) so it competes without matching a large company’s cash.
• New article: Bad Bedfellows — how a viable startup gets sunk not by its idea but by the people the founders are in business with, and the structures that contain the damage.
• New article: False Positive Trap — how a startup mistakes a narrow, atypical segment’s real love for proof of broad demand and scales into a market that was never there, with Better Place as the cautionary case and the discovery discipline that prevents it.
• New article: Pilot Purgatory — the enterprise-sales trap where a startup accumulates proofs-of-concept that never convert to paid contracts, why it happens, the harm to runway and fundraising, and the way out.
• New article: Premature Scaling — why pouring team and spend into growth before demand is real is the most quantitatively documented way startups die, and how to gate scaling on evidence instead.
• New article: The Cascading Miracles Trap — why a business that needs a long chain of hard bets to all go right is a low-probability strategy however good each bet looks alone, and how to shorten the chain.
• New article: The Help Wanted Trap — how a startup with product-market fit can still fail because it can’t hire the one leader the next phase requires, and how to escape it.
• New article: Data Moat — what makes proprietary data an actual competitive advantage in the AI era, the four conditions under which data defends a position, and the common overclaim that mistakes a copyable data asset for a moat.
• New article: The AI Wrapper Trap — how to tell a thin layer over a foundation model from a genuinely defensible AI business, and how to build the moat a bare wrapper lacks before the platform or a fast follower copies it.
• New article: Acquisition Exit — how a startup sale actually works, the three kinds of acquisition, and why the terms set years earlier decide who gets paid.
• New article: IPO vs. Acquisition Decision — how growth-stage founders and their boards weigh a public offering against a sale, from the revenue and growth thresholds that gate the IPO to founder liquidity, fund timelines, and the cost of life as a public company.

Metrics

• Total articles: 75
• Coverage: 75 of 89 proposed concepts written (84%)
• Articles edited since last checkpoint: 0