100+ Startup and Venture Capital Terms, Explained
If you're stepping into a startup internship, or an internship at a venture capital firm, for the first time, you've probably already noticed that everyone around you seems to be speaking a slightly different language. A pitch deck, a cap table, a SAFE, a term sheet: none of these are complicated ideas on their own, but hearing five of them in a single meeting before you've learned any of them can make you feel a step behind from day one.
This guide is a plain-language glossary of 107 real startup and venture capital terms, organized into eight categories: funding and investment, cap table and equity, the fundraising process, startup metrics, VC fund structure, exits, team and culture, and everyday jargon that doesn't fit neatly anywhere else. Skim to whichever category matches what you're actually hearing around you right now, and treat the rest as a reference to come back to.
If you want to see what startup internships are available at your disposal, check out a list here! And if you’re a bit worried about the suitability of your experience for the role, this blog will help you out!
This is a plain-language glossary of 107 real startup and venture capital terms, organized into eight categories: funding and investment, cap table and equity, the fundraising process, startup metrics, VC fund structure, exits, team and culture, and everyday jargon. Most of the confusion in a startup or VC internship comes from unfamiliar vocabulary, not unfamiliar ideas; once you know a term like runway, cap table, or SAFE, the concept behind it is usually simple. When an unfamiliar term comes up in a meeting, the fastest move is to look it up immediately rather than nodding along and hoping context fills the gap later. It's useful for any student starting an internship at a startup or venture capital firm, or reading a pitch deck, cap table, or investor update for the first time.
Why is startup and venture capital jargon so hard to navigate at first?
Startup and venture capital vocabulary didn't develop for the benefit of anyone hearing it for the first time. It's a mix of finance terms (valuation, dilution), legal shorthand (SAFE, term sheet), and internal shop talk (ship, scrappy, blitzscaling) that built up over decades of founders and investors talking to each other, not to newcomers. Walking into a startup or VC internship without this vocabulary isn't a sign you're behind; it just means nobody's handed you the glossary yet.
This is exactly the kind of gap a program like Ladder Internships is built to close. Every student is paired with both a company manager and a dedicated Ladder Coach, so when an unfamiliar term comes up in a real meeting, there's someone whose job is to explain it on the spot, not just a glossary to look up later. More on that below.
You don't need to read this front to back or memorize all terms at once. Skim to whichever category matches what you're actually hearing in meetings right now: fundraising language if your team is raising, metrics language if you're building a dashboard, and treat the rest as a reference to come back to.
Funding and investment terms
These terms show up anywhere money changes hands, from a founder's first check to a later-stage round, and they're usually the first vocabulary a student trips over in a startup or VC internship.
Pre-seed: the earliest stage of funding, usually used to build a first version of the product or prove an idea is worth pursuing, often before there's real revenue.
Seed round: the first official funding round for a startup, typically used to hire an initial team and get the product in front of real users.
Series A: the funding round that usually follows seed, raised once a startup has some traction and needs capital to grow it into a repeatable business.
Series B and beyond: later funding rounds (B, C, D...) raised as a company scales, usually at a higher valuation and with more institutional investors involved.
Bridge round: a smaller round raised between two larger rounds, usually to extend runway until the company hits a milestone that justifies the next full round.
Convertible note: a loan that converts into equity later, usually at the next priced round, instead of being repaid in cash like a normal loan.
SAFE: short for Simple Agreement for Future Equity, a common early-stage investment document that, like a convertible note, converts into equity later without setting a valuation upfront.
Term sheet: a short document outlining the proposed terms of an investment (valuation, amount, investor rights) before the full legal paperwork is drafted.
Valuation: what a startup is estimated to be worth at a given point, used to determine how much equity an investor receives for a given check size.
Pre-money valuation: a company's valuation before a new round of investment is added to it.
Post-money valuation: a company's valuation after a new round of investment is added, calculated as pre-money valuation plus the new money raised.
Dilution: the reduction in an existing shareholder's ownership percentage that happens whenever a company issues new shares, usually as part of a new funding round.
Runway: how long a company can keep operating before it runs out of cash, based on its current spending rate.
Burn rate: how much cash a company spends each month beyond what it brings in, the number that determines how long its runway actually lasts.
Follow-on investment: additional money an existing investor puts into a company in a later round, rather than a brand-new investor joining.
Lead investor: the investor who sets the terms of a round and usually contributes the largest check, with other investors following their lead.
Syndicate: a group of investors who pool their money to invest in a deal together, often organized around a lead investor or angel.
Angel investor: an individual, rather than a firm, who invests their own money in early-stage startups, usually at the seed or pre-seed stage.
Accredited investor: an individual who meets specific income or net worth requirements that legally allow them to invest in private companies and funds.
Down round: a funding round where a company raises money at a lower valuation than its previous round, usually a sign that growth slowed or expectations reset.
Cap table and equity terms
These terms describe who actually owns a piece of the company, and they matter just as much to an early employee deciding whether to take stock options as they do to a founder negotiating a term sheet.
Cap table: short for capitalization table, a spreadsheet listing everyone who owns equity in a company and exactly how much each person or investor holds.
Equity: ownership in a company, usually represented as shares or a percentage stake.
Vesting: the schedule over which someone earns the equity or options they've been granted, rather than receiving it all upfront.
Cliff: the initial waiting period, commonly one year, before any equity vests at all, even if the overall vesting schedule is longer.
Stock options: the right to buy company shares at a fixed price in the future, commonly granted to employees as part of compensation.
Option pool: a set of shares set aside specifically to grant as stock options to current and future employees.
Common stock: the standard class of shares typically held by founders and employees, with fewer built-in protections than preferred stock.
Preferred stock: the class of shares typically issued to investors, which usually comes with extra rights like a liquidation preference.
Liquidation preference: a term that guarantees an investor gets their money back (or a multiple of it) before common shareholders get paid out in an acquisition or shutdown.
Pro rata rights: an investor's right to invest again in a future round to maintain their existing ownership percentage, rather than being diluted by it.
Anti-dilution provision: a protection that adjusts an investor's ownership if the company later raises money at a lower valuation than the investor originally paid.
Founder vesting: a vesting schedule applied to the founders themselves, usually required by investors to make sure a founder who leaves early doesn't keep a full, unearned stake.
Fully diluted shares: the total share count if every option, warrant, and convertible security were exercised or converted, used to calculate a more accurate ownership percentage.
Strike price: the fixed price at which a stock option can be exercised, set when the option is granted.
409A valuation: an independent valuation of a private company's common stock, used to legally set a fair strike price for employee stock options.
Fundraising process terms
These terms describe the actual mechanics of raising money, the documents, conversations, and steps a founder goes through between a first meeting and a wired check.
Pitch deck: the slide presentation a founder uses to walk investors through the problem, product, market, and ask during a fundraise.
Data room: a shared folder of financial, legal, and operational documents an investor reviews during due diligence before finalizing an investment.
Due diligence: the research process an investor runs to verify a company's claims (financials, contracts, team, market) before actually wiring money.
Warm introduction: being introduced to an investor through someone they already trust, generally far more effective than a cold email.
Investment memo: an internal document a VC writes to summarize a deal and argue for (or against) investing in it, often reviewed by the rest of the fund's partners.
Deal flow: the stream of potential investment opportunities a VC fund sees, whether through warm intros, cold outreach, or its own research.
Closing a round: the point at which the paperwork is signed and the money actually moves, officially completing the funding round.
Bridge financing: short-term funding meant to get a company to its next milestone or full round, rather than a complete round on its own.
Signal risk: the risk that a well-known investor's decision not to invest sends a negative signal to other investors, even if the actual reason had nothing to do with the company's quality.
Oversubscribed round: a round where investors want to put in more money than the company is actually raising, giving the founder leverage to choose investors or raise the amount.
Investor update: a regular email or report a founder sends to their investors summarizing progress, challenges, and asks, usually monthly or quarterly.
Board seat: a formal position on a company's board of directors, often granted to a lead investor as part of a funding round.
Board observer: a non-voting seat that lets an investor attend board meetings and stay informed without holding formal board authority.
Lead vs. participating investor: the lead sets the terms and does most of the diligence work; participating investors join the round on those same terms without leading the negotiation.
No-shop clause: a term sheet provision that prevents a founder from shopping the deal to other investors for a set period while the current deal is being finalized.
Startup metrics and growth terms
These terms are how a startup or a VC actually measures whether the business is working, and they show up constantly in board decks, investor updates, and internal dashboards.
MRR: monthly recurring revenue, the predictable revenue a subscription business collects every month.
ARR: annual recurring revenue, MRR multiplied by twelve, used as the standard growth metric for subscription businesses.
Churn: the rate at which customers cancel or stop paying over a given period, one of the most closely watched metrics for a subscription business.
CAC: customer acquisition cost, how much a company spends, on average, to acquire one new paying customer.
LTV: customer lifetime value, the total revenue a company expects to earn from a customer over the entire relationship.
Burn multiple: a capital-efficiency metric comparing how much cash a company burns to how much new revenue it generates, used to judge whether growth is coming cheaply or expensively.
Unit economics: the profit or loss on a single unit of the business (one customer, one order), used to judge whether the business model actually works at scale.
Product-market fit: the point at which a product clearly satisfies strong market demand, usually visible through organic growth, high retention, or customers actively pulling the product rather than the company pushing it.
TAM, SAM, and SOM: total addressable market, serviceable addressable market, and serviceable obtainable market, three progressively narrower estimates of how big an opportunity actually is.
North star metric: the single metric a company treats as the clearest proxy for whether it's creating real value for customers.
Growth rate: how quickly a key metric (usually revenue or users) is increasing over a given period, typically expressed month over month or year over year.
Retention rate: the percentage of customers or users who stick around over a given period, the inverse of churn.
Net revenue retention: a metric tracking whether existing customers' spend grows, shrinks, or stays flat over time, factoring in upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations.
Gross margin: the percentage of revenue left after subtracting the direct cost of delivering the product or service.
Cohort analysis: tracking a specific group of users who joined during the same period, to see how their behavior (spending, retention) changes over time compared to other cohorts.
VC firm and fund structure terms
These terms describe how a venture capital firm itself is actually structured, which matters most if you're interning at a fund rather than at a startup.
General partner (GP): a senior member of a VC firm who makes investment decisions and manages the fund's money on behalf of its investors.
Limited partner (LP): an investor who puts money into a VC fund but doesn't make individual investment decisions, relying on the fund's general partners to do that.
Fund size: the total amount of money a VC fund has raised from its limited partners to invest across its portfolio.
Carried interest (carry): the share of a fund's profits that general partners keep as compensation for generating returns, on top of any management fee.
Management fee: an annual fee a VC firm charges to cover its own operating costs, separate from any profits it earns.
Vintage year: the year a fund made its first investment, used to compare its performance against other funds raised around the same time.
Portfolio company: a startup that a VC fund has invested in, now considered part of that fund's portfolio.
Investment thesis: the specific theory a fund uses to decide what it invests in, whether that's an industry, a stage, a business model, or some combination.
Check size: the typical dollar amount a fund invests in a single deal.
Reserves: money a fund sets aside specifically to make follow-on investments in its existing portfolio companies, rather than for new deals.
Fund of funds: an investment vehicle that invests in other VC funds rather than directly in startups.
Co-investment: when two or more investors invest in the same deal alongside each other, often splitting a round between a lead and one or more co-investors.
Exit and outcome terms
These terms describe how an investment, or a founder's company, actually ends up returning money, whether that's a headline-grabbing IPO or a quiet write-off.
Exit: any event where an investor or founder converts their equity into cash, most commonly through an acquisition or IPO.
Acquisition: when another company buys a startup outright, the most common type of exit.
IPO: initial public offering, when a private company sells shares to the public for the first time and starts trading on a stock exchange.
Acquihire: an acquisition made primarily to bring on the startup's team, rather than for its product or revenue.
Secondary sale: when an existing shareholder (an early employee or investor) sells their shares to someone else, rather than the company issuing brand-new shares.
Unicorn: a privately held startup valued at $1 billion or more.
Write-off: when a fund determines an investment is worth nothing and formally records it as a loss.
MOIC: multiple on invested capital, how many times over an investor got their original money back from a given investment.
IRR: internal rate of return, a metric that accounts for how long money was invested, not just how much came back, making it more useful for comparing investments held for different lengths of time.
Liquidity event: any event, an acquisition, an IPO, or a secondary sale, that lets shareholders actually convert their equity into cash.
Startup team and culture terms
These terms describe how startups actually operate day to day, especially in the earliest stages, when the team is small and the roles are still being figured out.
Co-founder: one of the people who started the company, typically holding significant early equity and playing a central role in its direction.
Bootstrapping: building and growing a company using its own revenue or the founders' personal savings, rather than outside investment.
Pivot: a significant change in a company's product, business model, or target market, usually made after the original approach wasn't working.
MVP: minimum viable product, the simplest version of a product a team can build to start testing whether an idea actually works.
Sweat equity: ownership earned through unpaid work or reduced pay rather than a cash investment, common among very early employees or co-founders.
Advisor: someone outside the core team, often an experienced founder or industry expert, who provides guidance in exchange for a small equity stake.
Cross-functional: work that spans multiple teams or disciplines (like product and marketing together), common at small startups where roles aren't as siloed.
Scrappy: a common description for solving a problem with limited resources, using creativity or effort rather than money.
Founder-market fit: how well suited a founder's specific background and skills are to the exact problem they're trying to solve.
Zero to one: building something genuinely new that didn't exist before, as opposed to improving something that already works (often called "one to n").
Wearing many hats: a common phrase for the reality of an early-stage role, where one person handles tasks across several functions instead of one narrow job.
Everyday startup jargon
These terms don't fit neatly into a single category, but they come up constantly in everyday startup conversation, and knowing them makes a meeting far easier to follow.
Stealth mode: when a startup is operating without publicly revealing what it's building, usually to avoid tipping off competitors before launch.
Traction: early, measurable evidence that a product is gaining real interest or usage, often the first thing investors ask about.
Hockey stick growth: a growth curve that stays flat for a while and then rises sharply, named for the shape it makes on a chart.
Moat: a durable advantage that protects a company from competitors copying what it does, such as a network effect, a brand, or proprietary technology.
Flywheel: a self-reinforcing cycle where one part of the business feeds growth into another part, which then feeds back into the first, compounding over time.
Blitzscaling: prioritizing extremely fast growth over efficiency, usually to capture a market before competitors can.
Growth hacking: using creative, often low-cost, experiments to grow a user base quickly, rather than relying only on traditional marketing spend.
Sunset (a product): officially discontinuing a product or feature, usually communicated to users ahead of time.
Ship: to release a product, feature, or update to actual users, as in "we shipped the update on Friday."
How do you make these terms stick once you're actually in a meeting?
The real test of this glossary isn't whether you can define a term on a quiz, it's whether you recognize it fast enough in a live meeting to actually follow what's being decided. The next time an unfamiliar term comes up, the fastest move is to look it up immediately rather than nodding along and hoping context fills in the gap later, since most of these terms get used again within the same conversation.
A structured internship is one of the fastest ways to actually absorb this vocabulary, because you're hearing it attached to a real decision instead of a textbook example. In a program like Ladder Internships, a student working inside an actual startup or nonprofit for roughly eight weeks ends up hearing terms like runway, churn, or cap table used in the exact context they were built for, in a real investor update or a real weekly check-in with a company manager, which sticks in a way a glossary alone never quite manages.
Common questions about startup and VC terminology
1. Do I need to memorize all 107 of these terms before starting an internship?
No. Skim the categories closest to what your specific role touches (metrics if you're in a data-heavy role, fundraising terms if your team is raising) and treat the rest as a reference you come back to as needed.
2. Is startup vocabulary different from venture capital vocabulary?
They overlap heavily, but a VC-side internship leans more on fund structure and return terms (carry, IRR, LP), while a startup-side internship leans more on metrics and team terms (churn, MVP, pivot). This glossary covers both because most students encounter some of each.
3. What's the fastest way to actually learn these terms instead of just reading them once?
Notice the term the next time it comes up in a real meeting or document, and connect it back to this list right then, rather than trying to memorize the whole glossary in one sitting. Vocabulary tied to a real, specific moment sticks far better than one read cold.
4. Are these terms the same at every startup, or do they vary by company?
The core definitions are standard across the industry, but the specific numbers behind them (a typical check size, a typical burn rate) vary a lot by stage and sector, so treat the definitions as fixed and the numbers as context-dependent.