A founders’ agreement is the contract among co-founders setting out equity splits, roles, vesting, decision-making and what happens if a founder leaves.

Ramen profitability is when a startup earns just enough to cover the founders’ basic living costs, making it sustainable without further funding.

Marketplace liquidity is the ease and reliability with which buyers find sellers (and vice versa) and transactions actually happen on a platform.

A platform business model creates value by enabling exchanges between two or more groups, such as buyers and sellers, rather than producing goods itself.

Blue ocean strategy seeks to create uncontested new market space, making competition irrelevant, instead of fighting rivals in a crowded ‘red ocean’.

Zero to one, from Peter Thiel, describes creating something genuinely new — going from nothing to something — rather than copying what already exists (one to n).

A moonshot is an extremely ambitious, high-risk project that aims for radical, order-of-magnitude breakthroughs rather than incremental improvement.

Operating leverage describes how much a company’s profits rise as revenue grows, given its mix of fixed versus variable costs.

The Business Model Canvas is a one-page template that maps the nine building blocks of a business, from value proposition to revenue streams.

OKR is a goal-setting framework pairing an ambitious qualitative Objective with a few measurable Key Results that define success.