X for Y. Stealth mode. Failing fast. Term sheets. Get all that? Well, you just may live in Northern California.
Silicon Valley has a severe, likely incurable addiction to jargon. In an attempt to make this innovation mecca seem less opaque to newcomers or outsiders, Rochelle Kopp and Steven Ganz have written a manual to explain all that jazz. “We really felt like there was a need for it,” says Ganz, a startup founder himself. “We’re working with companies that are sometimes new to Silicon Valley, that are needing to interact with people here and needing to understand how things are done here. And often the biggest stumbling block to that is the language itself.”
To mark the arrival of Valley Speak: Deciphering the Jargon of Silicon Valley, TIME has constructed a quiz based on the book’s definitions to determine whether you’re a whiz kid or the human equivalent of a down round.
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