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Startups Can't Explain What They Do Because They're Addicted To Meaningless Jargon (qz.com)
Josh Horwitz of Quartz, who is attending RISE Conference, has an observation to share about the startups he is seeing at the event: As startup culture has gone global and transcended stereotypes, though, one of its defining traits has stuck around. Startup jargon is alive and well, and it seems to be getting worse. "Content." "Platforms." "Synergy." "End-to-end." "Solutions." It's nearly impossible to find a startup at the conference that doesn't resort to jargon when describing itself. These words sound technical and informed. But they mean nothing, and they make it difficult for ordinary people to understand what a company actually does. In an effort to either sound smart and attract investors, or to simply dress up an otherwise boring product, startups that rely too much on jargon end up alienating the users they want to attract.Also in the report, Horowitz talks about an app called Cubes, and how it was pitched to him. "We visually organize your email and cloud-based content for ultra fast access. It's visual storytelling with any type of content." The app essentially retrieves non-text attachments from one's email or Dropbox account, takes screenshots of those things and bundles them together in a standalone app.
I'm afraid that "We visually organize your email and cloud-based content for ultra fast access. It's visual storytelling with any type of content." was perfectly clear to me.
I think I've spent too much time absorbing technical buzzwords.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is that many startups don't do anything of value. A lot of those terms suggest to me they're either middlemen or advertisers. If you have a truly innovative product, it should be easy to describe. The word "content" isn't necessarily bad, though. If I'm writing articles and creating videos about a topic, it might be easier to say I'm producing educational content.
And I just won!
...you forgot "Disruption" as part of the used jargon.
Wow I can't stand that word. If that word comes up in your pitch im walking away right then. Not going to say anything just turn around and leave.
Business has always embraced the unknown and as if it's exotic. Startups have this figured out, investors not so much.
It's a whole-home item aggregation service where the user can organize and prioritize deficit values to leverage on-demand expenditures.
-- grocery list
Add yours below!
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
To call the type of cutting edge thought leadership that we do in our particular paradigm landscape nothing more than jargon is simply unsubstantiated. By leveraging the de-facto enterprise-ready solutionspace that your clients are already engaged with, we enable your company to provide truly agile customer-driven projects that have a low ready to market to headcount ratio.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
The semantic web is the next big thing after Siri and nuances we use to depict data on a specific network.
Of course LUDDITES wouldn't understand app apping, because only apps can app apps, and when you have apps that app other apps while apping other apps, everything becomes super appy!
Apps!
One of the best things you'll ever read
Chip Morningstar is an author, developer, programmer and designer of software systems, mainly for online entertainment and communication.
Our unicorn is blowing cash out the wazoo for great company perks like food, foosball tables and laundry service for overpriced talent. We might even make a profit by accident. Yahoo!
I worked for the recruiting team at a large advertising parent company earlier this year. I was part of the research group that built a database of potential candidates for the recruiters, which meant wading through histories of startups and a deluge of nonsensical company visions and practices. Not only was it impossible to tell what half of the companies did, but a lot of the time I was hard pressed to even categorize them in a broader sense to show what kind of sector experience a potential had.
I never really liked speaking in jargon.
I have done proposals to VCs with the produce displayed in simple, terse sentences. The original draft got snubbed, because the would-be funders wanted to see words like "cloud based", "hyperconvergence", "deperimeterization", and other puffery. It almost is a different language, where just stating that "this is something that does 'x'" has to be obfuscated into paragraphs of fluff.
Weird Al's Mission Statement.
Simply crib and your next status report is done.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mission Statement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
This is just the latest crop of buzzword bingo fruit that was sewn 10 years ago, when recruiters, HR drones, and venture capitalists started looking for absurd words on the coversheet.
That modern proposals resemble something coming from a Markov Chain generator script should come as no surprise to anyone. "Professional Resumes" look just as bad, with non-speak like "X years experience in a fast-paced, competative environment", when what they really mean is that they spent X years in the trenches of level 1 support purgatory.
Industry in general is addicted to useless jargon. Startups are just industry 2.0, and have enhanced the practice.
For your amusement, I present to you the Startup Generator.
Love sees no species.
Unicorn founder in a turtleneck:"Our start-up is a platform that provides the necessary synergy to pair content with end-to-end solutions"
VC firms:"Here's $500million!"
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Which is the problem. Anybody familiar with the language of the tech business will understand it.
Anybody who isn't will think you're spouting gibberish.
Just like your mom would slap you upside the head if you started babbling about following null pointers. And why your eyes probably glaze over when your doctor mentions that adabadaramadamadingdongafil is contraindicated by the presence of sebaceous kerjiggers on your splagnic ganglion.
My general theory, which has served me great for academia, and the business world, and probably applies to startups just is well is:
If someone can't explain something very well in plain English, its almost certainly because they don't understand it very well themselves.
Silicon Valley... umm, the sitcom. Box vs. Platform. They've mined the stereotypes and jargon to nice to comedic effect. Bachmanity.
...for an investor/customer perspective that actually knows what those words should mean and imply. You hear the buzz pitch, then you look at the actual technology, and see if they really used the buzz correctly. If they didn't, you can probably bet that the actual product is crap. Saves you having to go through wasting a few weeks trying the technology out and being disappointed.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
I am not in that business or, in fact, in any business, however I can tell you exactly what all of those words mean in this context, and those meanings are directly and intuitively related to their meaning outside this context. OP just has a reading comprehension deficiency.
By leveraging crowd-based efforts through public consciousness.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
A foreign language has been creeping into many of the presentations I hear and the memos I read. It adds nothing to a message but noise, and I want your help in stamping it out. It's called gobbledygook. There's no shortage of examples. Nothing seems to get finished anymore it gets "finalized." Things don't happen at the same time but "coincident with this action." Believe it or not, people will talk about taking a "commitment position" and then because of the "volatility of schedule changes" they will "decommit" so that our "posture vis-à-vis some data base that needs a sizing will be able to enhance competitive positions." That's gobbledygook. (February 19, 1970)
Also on topic: the turbo encabulator.
This is not a new phenomenon, unfortunately.
Or tech writers.
Seriously, tell me WTF this company does:
Gina’s Ink, Incorporated has created a platform called the Change My World Now Initiative, which engages, educates and empowers American children, facilitating their ability to reach out and in turn, empower children in countries around the world to move beyond their present circumstances and to find the independence and dignity that education can provide.
The Change My World Now Initiative transforms the conversation that children are having with themselves, their peers, their parents and their community. Instilling the ideas of self-reliance, self-worth, tolerance, and self-acceptance early in life will have a radical effect on children, their future, and their circles of influence, creating a cadre of young leaders, truly...Changing the World One Bright Light at a Time.
The issue is that many times they think that they won't be taken seriously if they don't use a bunch of jargon. I run into this type of thinking all the time within my field. Customer documents that read like they were written by the devil spawn resulting from a threeway between a lawyer, an engineer, and a marketing executive. It's a hard habit to get out of. People think if you use simple language the customer won't think you are good at what you do. I have to remind people that the document is for reading, not trying to show how smart you think you are. Plus, if the damn thing is actually readable, it might actually get read. Nothing sucks more than generating a 200 page document that it exists solely to check off a deliverable checkbox.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
yeah, but some things you really do just use.
All you need to know about jargon Weird Al sums up nicely in this music video.
Are you sure that the reason for the jargon isn't that they can't explain what they do?
Somehow I got onto a mailing list called "Disruptive", so much nonsense in those newsletters and unsubscribe just wouldn't work so I had to block them.
To be fair, Disruption is not nearly as effective if you can escape from it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When your resume goes into the HR soup it is analyzed for certain keywords. Fail to include the important ones and your resume goes in the reject file.
Perhaps investors are actually looking for these idiotic keywords. Talk plain and you lose.
...omphaloskepsis often...
morale of the story: don't bullshit a bullshitter lol...
Hold on, you're telling me that there's a company called Gina's Ink Inc???
It's intentionally misleading so some people can make a buck.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I've lost count of the number of times I've had to go to Wikipedia to get a simple explanation of what a company does or makes because the company website was basically nonsense.
You owe the "profanity jar" enough to buy lunch for the whole office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps
Silicon Valley was so right. My Sig other has learned more about the Silicon Valley watching this show (and Office Space) than any other method...
Collaboration and decision-making prioritize the customers. Reality-based, prospective and high-quality touchpoints diligently aggregate business enabling and/or value-added plans. The executive committee empowers socially enabled communications, whereas the resource quickly maximizes pre-integrated targets. The game changers stay in the mix. The resources differentially institutionalize our executive-level solution providers; this is why our focus turbocharges a granularity. The senior support staff establishes the scoping, while a business-for-business collaboration genuinely synergizes the executive committee. The gatekeeper technically embraces our verifiable platforms over the long term.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"... never bad mouth Synergy." - Jack Donaghy
In my experience, yeah, this is a problem. I worked with one software startup run by guys with PhDs in AI and ML from MIT who had diligently read every "How to become a billionaire" book they could find and had lost the ability to speak Human.
On the other hand, I worked with a robotics hardware startup run by other recent PhDs who are very focused and down to Earth, maybe because they work with physical objects instead of code. It's a common problem, not a universal problem.
Pretty sure I saw a documentary about Empowered Children a while ago...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It must be aligned in the first place in order to be called synergistic
You posted to the wrong article. Good job, dipshit.
Dot com bubble 2.0
The language in academic papers is inflated because the authors are afraid they don't have enough to say. The exception is that rare, rare animal: the seminal paper; papers that really changes things fundamentally in a field. Those are almost invariably written with stark simplicity. You can usually give them to beginner students in the field and they'll have no problem following.
Are papers seminal because they're clearly written? I don't think so; I think what a seminal paper does is communicate a naked simplifying insight that strips away a lot of confusion. The straightforward language is a kind of brash advertisement of that fact.
The reason I think that is that not hacking your meaning into semantic gobbledygook is almost seen as posing. I worked with some Harvard researchers on a grant proposal, and when I sent the draft of my bits to the Harvard team they sent them back butchered into jargon word stew. "This is terrible writing!" I said. "Yes," the researcher said, "it's deplorable. But trust me, it'll play well." And dammit, it did.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Proprietor of Dry Cleaners: I'm not disclosed to bespeak any such information to you, nor would I, even if I had said information you want, at this juncture be able.
Translation: Cubes is actually an app that pinpoints anything that’s not plain-Jane text in your email or Dropbox accounts (a photograph, an excel file, a YouTube video), takes snapshots of those things, and then bundles them together in a standalone app. The idea is, if you receive a lot of photo attachments via email, for example, it will be easier to find them if they’re kept separate from your cluttered inbox.
Rathod says he’s prone to jargon in part because his product is simply hard to explain. Cubes is not quite an email inbox, not quite a Dropbox clone, and not quite a photo library. “It’s always hard to get the right verbiage,” he tells Quartz.
Searchable account aggregation.
See, easy.
It is manifesting in new forms rapidly!
Cue up the firebombs
morons with money. still morons.
they ask to be told bullshit. tell them what u really do and they walk away because it's boring with no potential.
1) You're clearly in the wrong thread.
2) Who the hell modded this up?
My guess is that startups are communicating in the language that their customers (aka venture capitalists) understand.
Sadly, that isn't the language that their beta users (aka customers) understand...
Confusing, well, simply imagine the message you are trying to communicate is this... "blah, blah, blah, fear of missing out, yada, yada, yada..."
.... should be making millions in marketing right now.
You made an invalid point, under the wrong story. Well done.
Isn't the word "startup" itself meaningless buzz. It's just a new company.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
Patents Can't Explain What The Invention Is Because They're Full Of Meaningless Jargon
That's my experience, at least. The failing is mine however, as while I can't understand what patents try to say it seems plenty of other people can. I wonder if "Startup Speak" is a similar situation - people who work in that realm understand the language, but just because those of us outside that realm don't grok the language doesn't necessarily mean it's meaningless...?
"We sucker money from rich-but-dumb investors using vague bullshit, buzzwords, and glitzy websites that do nothing useful."
Table-ized A.I.
I keep hearing about these start ups and how lithe and agile they are and everyone dresses down and flat management structure and no politics. I've worked for small companies and my experience was that flat management meant that nobody was in charge. And trust me, small companies have plenty of office politics. It's just human nature and the people that are managers - they operate the same way no matter the size of the company. It's how they are trained.
The only reason to join a small company is to get some training (baptism by fire, but training none the less) and maybe cash in if they go public. Other than that you can look forward to low pay, crummy benefits and a chaotic work environment.
All corporate environments involve meaningless buzzwords and unnecessary meetings. Big ones just have more of it.
>> The app essentially ...takes screenshots of those things and bundles them together
it's data-mining to promote win-win synergies and enabling ultra-collaborative cross-team visualizations for end-to-end global solutions in the cloud *cough*
In an effort to either sound smart and attract investors, or to simply dress up an otherwise boring product, startups that rely too much on jargon end up alienating the users they want to attract.
Sounding smart and especially attracting investors is the entire point.
While killing of buzzword obsessed presenters would be a great service to the world, you seem to be too stupid to actually common on the correct article.
This is the article for making fun of MBA holders.
You want 'pretentious foreign assholes', down two articles, take a left.
Combines a Flexible Hardware and Software Platform leveraging Your Existing Points of Presence to create a Distributed Solution to Encompass Your Workflows.
anybody want to translate that into english??
My company is not a startup, but back in 2000 when it was, I had a really simple three-word description of what we did:
We stop spam.
And I'm convinced that having a clear understanding of what we were doing and a clear way to communicate it was a factor in our success.
Starting 1996 investors have been knocking on my door begging me to give them a chance to participate in the then dot com boom
I looked around, the price they were willing to pay was ridiculous
I knew something had gone terribly wrong so I started selling
By end of 1998 I sold off 80% of the startups (plural) that I owned (or co-owned) for great sum of $$
Then came the crash
I came back to the scene by mid 2001 or so, and this time around I came back as an investor, picking up valuable pieces (we insiders knew which one is worth how much, not the outsiders), as well as funding some new startups, not only those in the Valley but also the ones in other 'silicon clones' throughout USA
By 2004 I started looking outside of USA. Went first to Germany, made some investments there, then I went to the Far East - Taiwan, Korea, Hongkong, and finally, China
By 2008 the asking price of startups in the Valley got to the ridiculous range again, and I knew something was again amiss, but this time they were BIG NAMES in the sugardaddies list (including a certain multi-billionaire from Hongkong), so I figure the trend could go on a little while longer
But anyway, I started selling, again
By 2010 looking over the newer crop of Valley startups I could only sigh
By 2014 I attended some of those 'sessions' in the Valley where startups tried to impress investors I nearly fainted
Those kids simply do not have anything in common with us
We are nerds, we are geeks, we have a mission, we have a goal, we want to make something, we want to become useful
These kids? They are slick, - too slick , - and their only goal is to dupe the investors
Make no mistake, I still have operations in the Republic of California, but they are for the long haul
I am no longer interested in the 'startups' scene anymore because it has become too toxic for me
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Hey I was out of shampoo so I leveraged yours
Ironically, one of the startup guys mis-used "verbiage". I twitch when people ask me to "change the verbiage" in a document.
( FTA : "It’s always hard to get the right verbiage," )
I've given up and accepted that the word that once meant a collection of meaningless and unconnected thoughts has come to be used as a synonym for "wording" for people that want to sound smartier.
Dictionaries have started accepting the changed meaning, defining it as using too many words. Did it not originate as a contraction of "verbal garbage"?
Either the "old" or "new" definition - the guy apparently used it correctly, though possibly unaware of the meanings.
We recently became aware of these folks. The splash page is, well, benign enough: Deep Learning 2.0 for mobile robots on earth and in space. Around these parts, one might even think it a viable idea, if a little overhyped (me, I'd concentrate on either gravity or no-gravity first before attempting both). But go to their job listings. Sci-Fi writer. Robopsychologist. Zoologist. WTF?
http://www.demiurge.technology...
See their blog entries. They recently crowed about a $9.5M investment. Good for them. And then that they wanted to buy Boston Dynamics. A startup? Buying a company with a $500M valuation when purchased by Google? That's either very serious sit-up-and-pay-attention game they've got (which, again, around these parts is not entirely out of the question), or utter BS.