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The startup scene is permeated with buzzwords whose original meaning, if it ever existed, has been bastardized, forgotten or disregarded completely.
By:
Marwin Soudi
“Foster entrepreneurship, build ecosystems, and drive economic growth”
Disruptive innovation. Fostering entrepreneurs. MVP this and pivot that!
The startup scene is rife with buzzwords whose original meaning—if it ever existed—has been distorted, forgotten, or completely disregarded. It’s full of pointless events and stupid company slogans that claim to “foster entrepreneurs, build ecosystems, and impact economies.” What the hell does that even mean? FUCK YOU!
When people use buzzwords as crutches that allow them to avoid thinking critically about what they’re trying to achieve and why, it undermines their ability to think clearly and concretely.
When entire communities embrace buzzwords as substitutes for clear and concrete thinking, this undermines their effectiveness and their ability to change the world around them in meaningful ways.
Where it all begins…
I’ll explain how this happens, but first, let me give an example of the problem:
A startup summit is taking place at your local coworking space, and you attended one of the talks. There’s a 99.9 percent chance it’ll go something like this: “We are a company on a mission to invest in the future of ‘disruptive innovation’ in the FinTech Global Sharing Economy of…”and he loses you right there and spends five extra minutes explaining what that is. Excuse me while I gag.
If you want to give the speaker a stroke, walk up to them while everyone is networking, eating cookies, and sipping lattes, and ask them—genuinely and as bluntly as possible— “Can you please define what you mean by disruptive innovation?”
I guarantee you it won't have anything to do with the words "disruptive" or "innovation."
Very few innovations are truly disruptive. Yet it is rare to find an innovation that isn’t marketed as “disruptive.”
The Words You Use Are Making You Stupid
The fact is, the most effective way to talk about a new product or business is in plain English. The more innovative your product actually is, the less you’ll need to rely on buzzwords to justify it.
Tom Fishburne
It’s amazing how thoughtless things just slip out of people’s mouths, without them ever stopping to question or think. This can lead people astray.
People and companies like that ruin the potential of what entrepreneurship could be and turn it into a superficial, shitty mess.
Entrepreneurship and everything it entails is rooted in many foundational concepts that foster abstract thinking and dreamlike (if not almost blind) ambition. There is a growing tendency to move away from concrete, clearly defined ideas, and this love for abstract thinking has brought us ever closer to an abstract form of communication.
News flash, folks : “abstract” is open to interpretation and subjective understanding, which creates meaningless buzzwords that clueless entrepreneurs latch onto. It’s not a bad thing to push people toward abstract concepts. It helps build depth and connections to different ways of thinking, but it’s really dangerous to start off in the deep end. These things take practice, just like swimming. You don’t start off in the deep end and do a three-sixty backflip and plunge into the water; you start out looking like a total idiot wearing floaties and holding onto a wheel the size of a fucking whale! Learning anything well takes practice, understanding, and time.
This Sucks!
These days, everyone at events is the CEO of “this” or that, and they’re all building an MVP to disrupt a market that nobody cares about. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met supposedly experienced people who’ve latched onto buzzwords and concepts they can’t even define themselves.
If you’ve spent any time around startups or entrepreneurs, chances are you’ve heard phrases like “we’re launching an MVP,” or come across job titles like “Chief Innovation Officer” and “Hacker-in-Residence.” Even I have to admit I’ve fallen into the trap and given myself some bullshit title like “User Experience Evangelist”… wtf!
How often do you stop to think about what these terms mean, and whether your definitions match those of the people around you? What exactly does an Innovation Officer innovate? How do they know if they’re even innovating?
It is important to be precise with language. Using terms that do not correspond to concrete, widely understood concepts is dangerous.
This matters because our goals as entrepreneurs should not be vague: we have specific objectives we want to achieve. Our startups, businesses, and products are a means to an end. There are issues we observe in the world (such as a lack of clean drinking water, air pollution, and unemployment), and we want to address them.
Using poorly defined terms without a clear understanding of their meaning is like trying to play chess while wearing boxing gloves. You can’t be precise, and you can’t make the impact you want to make. But the effect is even more insidious than that: you think you understand what you’re saying, but you don’t. Or, worse still, you think others understand what you’re saying, and they don’t. If we’re not clear about our concepts, we can’t be sure that our actions will have the impact we seek.
In order to change reality, we must not allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking we understand it when we actually don’t.
An engineer who wants to build a rocket to go to the moon cannot simply throw around technical terms—“geosynchronous, lunar module, drag equations”—and expect to end up with a team that knows exactly how to work together and build a rocket that works. If her understanding of any of these concepts is flawed, she and her entire team will ultimately fail.
Similarly, a recent graduate might say, “Our startup improves digital literacy,” but if you don’t have a clear understanding of what digital literacy actually is, then your business won’t have the intended impact. That’s not to say it won’t have any impact at all. It might even be profitable. But is it solving the problem you actually set out to solve? Is it creating the impact you wanted it to have?
In the short term, and for individual founders, this might not matter. You can still move on, make money, or even possibly get acquired. But if that happened without a well-defined goal rooted in clear and concise thinking, communication, and understanding, I would attribute it to luck—something we shouldn’t try to replicate. In a society filled with startups that aren’t based on well-thought-out ideas that don’t solve real problems, society won’t have made any significant progress in the long run.
In the long run, you’d end up stuck in a fog of confusion, and believe me, I’ve seen entrepreneurs years down the road still chasing a dream and thinking they’ve achieved something just because they won some prize from an organization with yet another trendy name like“The Unicorn Tech Girls Competition.”
On a positive note:
I want you to know that it’s okay. It’s okay that you’ve built your entire life’s ambitions and goals on vague, superficial nonsense.
If you find yourself in this situation, that’s understandable and it’s okay: after all, you’re in a superficial environment. Whether you’re a screw-up or not, you’re probably a screw-up just by osmosis from all the stupidity around you.
The only serious mistake would be thinking you’re a brilliant outlier who isn’t influenced by your surroundings. Even if you don’t think you’re a screw-up, give yourself the benefit of the doubt and take another look: chances are, you probably are.
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