주요 스타트업 용어 및 개념 이해하기

Dalton이 필수 스타트업 용어를 설명하며 제품 실행 가능성과 재무 지표 이해의 중요성을 강조합니다.

### 주요 스타트업 용어 이해하기: Y Combinator의 Dalton이 전하는 인사이트
* 📦 MVP(최소기능제품)는 고객에게 목적을 달성할 수 있을 만큼 유용해야 하는 제품을 의미하며, **단순히 기능만 있는 제품이 아니라 실행 가능한 제품**이어야 한다는 점을 강조하는 용어입니다.
* 💰 벤처 캐피털(VC)은 소수의 스타트업이 크게 성공하여 실패할 수 있는 다수의 위험을 상쇄할 수 있기를 바라며 **소액의 자금을 스타트업에 투자**하는 것을 말합니다.
* 👼 엔젤 투자자는 일반적으로 개인이 자신의 개인 자금을 초기 단계의 회사에 부업으로 투자하는 개인으로, **기존 VC에 비해 투자 금액이 적은 경우**가 많습니다.
* 💸 수익성은 지출보다 더 많은 수익을 창출하는 것으로 정의되며, 스타트업이 성장함에 따라 수익률을 모니터링하는 것이 중요하며, **Google과 같은 성공적인 사례는 규모에 따른 높은 수익률의 중요성**을 강조합니다.
* 🔥 소진율은 회사가 매월 지출하는 금액을 나타내며, 창업자는 잠재적인 수익에도 불구하고 **자금이 부족하지 않도록 이 지표를 추적**하는 것이 중요합니다.
* 💵 시드 라운드는 일반적으로 스타트업이 처음으로 유치하는 상당한 금액의 자금으로, 일반적으로 **리드 투자자가 참여하는 시리즈 A, B 또는 C와 같은 후기 라운드**와 달리 규모와 구조가 매우 다양할 수 있습니다.
* 📈 제품 시장 적합성(PMF)은 스타트업의 제품이 사용자들의 공감을 얻을 때 발생하며, **고객 발굴에서 비즈니스 확장으로 초점을 전환**하여 PMF 달성 전후의 다른 우선순위를 강조합니다.
* 🚀 부트스트래핑은 외부 자금 없이 개인 자금이나 수익에만 의존하여 회사를 시작하는 것으로, **창업자가 비즈니스의 방향과 성장에 대한 완전한 통제권**을 갖습니다.

[Music] Hi there, my name is Dalton. I'm a managing partner at Y Combinator, and I'd like to talk to you about some startup terminology today. All right, so I'm going to go through some terms that are common in startup land and give you some more details and define it. Okay, let's talk about the term MVP or minimum viable product. So, let's be specific. The keyword here is viable. A product that doesn't work at all and is useless to everyone is not viable. And so, when you're thinking about what is an MVP or how should I build my MVP, it has to be useful enough to serve some kind of purpose for the customer. Again, that's that viable word. And so, it doesn't just mean a simple product that you built that doesn't do anything. It's got to be useful to someone for it to be viable. And so, remember this next time you're thinking about what should go in an MVP. The next term I'd like to talk about is

the term Venture Capital. Sometimes, the people that work in the Venture Capital industry are referred to as VCs. The way Venture Capital works is they invest a small amount of money to buy equity in startup companies with the hope that enough of those companies become very large to return the original investment that they made. They're also comfortable taking more risk than you would take in a traditional investment. It's often the case that the majority of a Venture Capital portfolio does not succeed, but the investments in the really big successful companies pay for everything. So, for instance, imagine you were an early investor in a company like Google or Apple or Facebook. That small investment ended up being worth so much. It was worth taking the risk when those were tiny unprofitable companies. And so, the way to think about venture capital is it's an industry that's looking for businesses that may be risky but could be very huge if they're successful. Is I understand the original Venture Capital was in the whaling industry. The way it worked is when

people uh would go out to hunt whales. A lot of times, the ventures would fail um, and so the people that needed money to start a ship needed to raise money from investors. The way they did a portfolio was they would invest in multiple ships in the hope that if one of them was successful in capturing the whale, it would pay for all the failed expeditions. I'd like to define what an angel investor is uh. No, that's not someone that is angelic. It's a type of venture capital investor that is investing usually their own personal money, not out of a VC fund. And they tend to be the earliest stage investor in a company. They also tend to write smaller checks, say $20,000 or $50,000 or something like that, and they tend to do it not as a full-time job. It'll be a hobby or a side project uh. They might be running a company, they might be retired. There's no qualification to be an angel investor. It's usually just someone that has money, and so you'll see just a wide

a wide type of people that do this, and the thing they have in common is they just writing personal checks into small startups, and they're doing it not as a full-time job. So, that's the best definition of an angel investor. Okay, another term in startups that I'd like to define is profitability. And look, there's some pretty obvious definitions of profitability, which is just you make more money every month than you spend, and that's a pretty good definition. But to add a little bit more to it, it's good to think about if a business, as it grows bigger and bigger, either has stable profit margins or if the profit margins increase or decrease. It's common to have a startup that at a very small scale might not be making money, but as it gets bigger and bigger, the profit margins increase. It's good to think about if you're starting a startup or if you're working at a startup, how your margins, i.e., the difference between how much you're making and how much you're spending, change as your company grows.

bigger and bigger, and what I'd be looking for is at scale, the profit margins are pretty good, and there's a clear way you make more and more money. To give you an example, something like Google. Google did not make any revenue for its first few years of existence, but the profit margins on online advertising are very high. And so, once Google turned on their monetization engine, they started to make an enormous amount of money. They are very profitable. You can look them up; they're publicly traded. And so, that's a great example of a company that initially was not making money, was not profitable, but was able to have an incredibly attractive business at scale once they turned on the monetization engine. And so, that's the kind of profitability engine you should be looking for as a startup founder too. Next, I'd like to talk about burn rate. Burn rate is how much money at the end of the month has been burned by your company or how much your bank account has gone down. So hypothetically

if you had a million dollars in the bank and at the end of the month you had $900,000 in the bank, your burn rate would be $100,000. As a startup founder, it is critical to watch your burn rate. You may be making money in some ways; you may have a lot of topline revenue, but if you're burning money every month, you might go out of business. And so, it's great as a startup founder to think hard about where the money is going and to pay careful attention to the bank account balance and make sure that your burn rate does not get out of control. Not paying attention to this is harmful to your startup's health. Next, I'd like to define a seed round. There's not a technical definition of what exactly is or isn't a seed round, so let me give an example. Say someone raises $300,000 on a SAFE. You could call that a seed round. Say that there's some crazy company that's founded by celebrities, and they raise $100 million on a billion.

dollar valuation. Sometimes they refer to that as a seed round. And so, because of this big variability, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly what is and isn't a seed round. U for the sake of argument, here's my suggestion. A seed round is usually the first amount of money that a new startup raises of any consequence. And so, usually when you begin a company and you raise the first amount of money and you say, Okay, we're done raising money, whatever amount of money it is that you raised, you would refer to as a seed round. In addition to other fundraising terms you may have heard of, a series A or a series B or a series C. Um, the difference between one of those rounds and a seed round. For one, it is often the case, but not always, that in a series A, B, or C, a lead investor is involved. You also may be giving a board seat to that person. It's also the case that it traditionally, uh, the lead investor gets a significant ownership percentage. So, for instance, traditionally in a series A, the lead investor might get something

like a 20% ownership in a seed round. Anything goes. It could be that it's entirely composed of 50k checks, and there is no lead investor, right? It's a very wide definition, but with a, there's usually one primary lead investor that leads the Series A, to use the terminology. And the same thing goes with Series B and C for startups that have been around a while. And when you keep raising a new round, you tend to give it a new name. And again, traditionally, you just keep incrementing the letters in the alphabet. And so you'll sometimes see companies that are like a Series E or a Series G or a Series H. I think I've definitely seen that before. What are the normal valuations for these? I don't know. It's a wide range. And so you can't just look at what the round letter is. You also want to look at what the valuation is. Next, I'd like to define product-market fit or PMF. Product-market fit is

something we talk about a lot at Y Combinator, and it's one of those terms where people talk about it so much you might think you know what it means, but the actual definition is a little bit tricky, and there's not actually a scientific explanation of it. A good way to think about product-market fit is when you've built something, and people are using it, and they like it a lot, and your biggest issue is no longer trying to define what people want or trying to make something people want. It's to start to be in growth mode and serve as many people as you can. Okay, and so one way to think about product-market fit when you're a founder is that needing to get more customers is not your biggest problem. You probably have other problems like scaling or like performance, like sales. You have all these other problems versus most startups when they first start do not have product-market fit. Essentially, all of them do not have product-market fit, and what this means is they may build something, they may have some assumptions about what

customers want, but they don't have any customers, or they haven't worked with enough customers to really figure out if it's serving their needs properly. Startups in the pre-product market fit stage are just spending all their time trying to test their assumptions, trying to build, trying to design, trying to talk to customers to really zero in on what these customers want. From our perspective, there's just a very different set of priorities when you're pre-product market fit versus post-product market fit. When you're pre-product market fit, all you should be worried about is finding product market fit. When you're post-product market fit, your job is to stay in that state, to keep product market fit, and to grow and scale to the best of your ability. It's good for you as a founder to realize that the tactics and priorities you should have are very different depending on which of these two modes you're in. I'd like to define the term bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is when you start a

company, and you do not raise any Venture Capital. You just use your own personal funds or the revenue from the business to get off the ground. So, for instance, if you were to start a new company that built an iPhone app, and you didn't raise any venture capital, and you just launched it on the App Store and started making lots of Revenue and built a successful company, you would call that a bootstrapping situation. You would say you are a bootstrapper because you didn't raise any money to do it. One of the reasons it's a great option is it's entirely within your control. You don't need the approval of investors to go bootstrap a company. It's also a good option if you're doing something that is not traditionally a venture business, a venture-scale business, which is something that could grow really, really big, really, really fast. Bootstrapping is a much, much better option for businesses that you expect to get to 5 to 10 million a year in Revenue, something like that, and to probably not grow beyond that. Bootstrapping is a great option.

convertible note in the context of startups is a financial instrument whereby an investor gives a startup money, and they sign a piece of paper. You should read carefully what this piece of paper says. In the case of a convertible note, it is a debt-like instrument. There are usually terms in a convertible note by which you would pay some amount of interest, or you might need to pay the investor back. And so, it's your job as a founder to read the fine print very carefully. An alternative to a convertible note is something called a safe note. A safe, also known as a simple agreement for future equity, is a financial instrument that was actually initially created by Y Combinator, specifically Carolyn Levy. And it is an alternative to a convertible note if you're raising as a startup founder, and you are not doing a priced round and selling preferred equity. A safe is a great option to quickly close money in a seed round ahead of when you would raise a Series A at a future date. If you're thinking about whether or not to raise

on a convertible note or a safe. I would encourage you to read carefully the fine print and understand the pros and cons of each. The advantage of a safe is that there are just fewer terms to worry about, as well as different rights, fewer rights in a convertible note, and so that's often very useful to startup founders. Equity is ownership in a startup company. Equity would refer to what percentage of that would add up to 100% of the company that a founder, employee, or investor would own. If you work at a startup, you may not directly get equity; you may get stock options, which are basically a right to, in the future, execute on the stock options to receive equity at that point in the future. And so, it's important for you, in the fine print, as both a founder, a startup employee, or an investor, to read the fine print and understand if you are getting stock options or if you're getting equity directly, or if you're investing in a safe, or you're investing in a convertible note, or some other

instrument always read the fine print and understand exactly what you are buying. Buying and selling Tam or total addressable Market is a term that you would hear a lot um in the land of startups. What it usually refers to is hypothetically if 100% of the potential customers of your product all purchase your product, how much money would you be making. No one actually would get to 100% of their Tam, it's more of just a thought experiment for how big the market could possibly be. So for instance, if you were trying to establish the Tam of something like a Tesla or a car manufacturer, you would look at how many total cars people buy across the world and that would be the total addressable market. And you would make an estimate of how many of the cars could be sold by Tesla. One um interesting point about Tam calculations is they can be wrong, they can underestimate how big the market could be. Again to give you an example, when Tesla first started, the total addressable market for electric cars was tiny and so you had to believe they the

market for electric cars would grow and be so big it would take over and be effectively the market for all cars. For the Tam to seem sufficiently big, in addition for a company like Uber when they first started, the total addressable market for taxis or for car services was quite small. But Uber dramatically increased the size of the market because they created a better user experience and they encouraged people to start taking ride-sharing that didn't before. And so this led to the initial Tam seeming much, much smaller than it ended up being. And so think of Tam as sort of just a potentially helpful thought experiment versus something that is set in stone. Great products tend to grow The Tam. Next, I'd like to define valuation. Valuation is a term that people in startup land talk about a lot. What it usually refers to is what valuation the last investor invested at. And so say there was a company that raised $2 million on a $20 million post-money safe. The valuation would be $20 million. The thing about valuation is it

doesn't actually mean there are always buyers and sellers. This doesn't work like the stock market. In the stock market, the stock price is the valuation, and anyone could go and publicly trade the stock at whatever their current market price is. With startup companies, they are privately held. There's not really a liquid market, and so it's best to think of valuation as just some measure of how it might be valued by some folks versus a true measure of how much that startup would be worth if it were to sell that day or if it were to go public that day. Often, you might have noticed that startups with high valuations don't always succeed, and so just think of it as a helpful term but not necessarily always accurate. Next, I'd like to define an IPO or initial public offering. An IPO is a company that is privately held, i.e., it is owned by its investors or its founders or its employees, and it issues shares or it sells shares to the public markets. The public markets are things like NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange or

other you know public exchanges like that, and anyone in the public that has some kind of stock brokerage account can buy some of those shares. The reason IPOs are important to startups is it's often a way for their employees, or their founders, or their investors to be able to realize money from the companies they have built. And it's also a great sign that the company is doing well. This isn't always the case, but IPO is the big goal that a company is financially mature, that it is growing well, and has built something of enduring value. Next, I'd like to define ARR, or annual recurring revenue. You will hear this term thrown around all the time in startup land, and let's break it down. Annual means every year. Here, recurring means the customers are either in some sort of subscription that auto-renews, or they've signed contracts that renew in some way. The third R is revenue, which should be obvious. That's just revenue. And so, the way to think about this is say you have a company, and you

have 10 customers that have each signed yearly contracts for $100,000 a piece that renew yearly. If you have 10 $100,000 contracts that renew yearly, that would be a million dollars of ARR. And so, the important thing here, if you're going to use this term, is to understand recurring is important. And so, make sure if you're reporting, if you're telling an investor you have ARR, make sure it actually recurs. And it also is best if it recurs on an annual basis. If you're quoting ARR, traditionally, if you're billing people on a monthly basis, you would quote MRR or monthly recurring revenue. And so, say it's a subscription to ChatGPT or something like that that renews monthly, you would more commonly see that revenue reported as MRR, monthly recurring revenue, versus ARR, which is more traditionally companies that bill once a year. All right, that was startup terminology with Dalton. I went through a number of terms you may have heard before, and I'll be sure to define more.

Starting A Company? The Key Terms You Should Know | Startup School

Videos to help you build a successful startup. Subscribe for startup advice, founder stories, and a look inside Y Combinator.

What is Y Combinator?
We invest $500,000 in every startup and work intensively with the founders for three months. For the life of their company, founders have access to the most powerful community in the world, essential advice, later-stage funding and programs, recruiting resources, and exclusive deals. 

Visit ycombinator.com to learn more.

Video Team:
Zach Both - Video and Content Lead
Ryan Loughlin - Senior Producer



Y Combinator

MVP(최소기능제품)는 단순하거나 쓸모없는 제품이 아니라 고객의 목적에 부합할 만큼 유용한 제품을 의미합니다.

벤처 캐피털은 스타트업 기업에 소액을 투자하여 큰 성공을 거둔 소수의 기업에 자금을 지원하기 위해 더 많은 위험을 감수하는 것을 포함합니다.

엔젤 투자자는 초기 단계의 스타트업에 부업으로 개인 자금을 투자하는 개인으로, 일반적으로 소액 수표를 작성합니다.

스타트업 창업자를 위한 핵심 개념

수익화 엔진을 켠 후 성공을 거둔 Google의 사례에서 알 수 있듯이 수익률은 규모에 따라 매우 매력적일 수 있습니다.

과도한 지출은 재정적인 문제로 이어질 수 있으므로 스타트업 창업자에게는 소진율을 모니터링하는 것이 매우 중요합니다.

시드 라운드는 일반적으로 신생 스타트업이 처음으로 조달하는 상당한 금액의 자금으로, 그 정의는 다양하지만 이후 라운드(A, B, C)에는 리드 투자자와 상당한 소유권 비율이 포함되는 경우가 많습니다.

스타트업 펀딩 및 제품-시장 적합성 이해

스타트업의 펀딩 라운드는 다양하며, 시드 라운드는 정의가 광범위하고 리드 투자자가 없는 경우가 많습니다.

스타트업이 성장함에 따라 점차적으로 새로운 라운드를 진행하여 시리즈 E 또는 G와 같은 레이블로 이어집니다.

제품 시장 적합성은 고객의 요구를 충족하고 성장에 집중할 수 있는 시기를 나타내는 스타트업에게 매우 중요하며, 제품 시장 적합성 전 단계에는 가정을 테스트하고 고객에게 적합한 제품을 찾는 것이 포함됩니다.

스타트업을 위한 부트스트랩 및 펀딩 옵션

부트스트랩이란 벤처 캐피탈을 조달하지 않고 개인 자금이나 사업 수익으로 회사를 창업하는 것을 말합니다.

창업자에게 모든 권한을 부여하기 때문에 연간 500만~1,000만 달러의 매출을 기대하는 비즈니스에 적합한 옵션입니다.

전환어음과 안전 어음은 스타트업 자금 조달을 위한 금융 상품으로, 안전 어음은 조건과 권리가 더 적어서 인기 있는 대안입니다.

스타트업의 TAM, 밸류에이션 및 IPO 이해

TAM(총 주소 가능 시장)은 잠재 고객의 100%가 제품을 구매할 경우 기업이 얻을 수 있는 가상의 수익을 의미하며, 시장 규모에 대한 사고 실험의 역할을 합니다.

테슬라나 우버처럼 시장을 급격히 성장시킨 기업에서 볼 수 있듯이 TAM 계산은 시장 잠재력을 과소평가할 수 있습니다.

스타트업의 밸류에이션은 마지막 투자자가 설정한 투자 가격을 의미하지만, 유동적인 시장이나 회사 가치의 정확한 측정을 보장하지는 않습니다.

IPO(기업 공개)는 비상장 기업이 자본을 조달하고 소유권을 확대하기 위해 주식을 대중에게 판매하는 것을 말합니다.

IPO는 창업자, 직원, 투자자가 재정적 수익을 실현하고 회사의 성공을 나타낼 수 있는 방법을 제공하기 때문에 스타트업에게 매우 중요합니다.

연간 반복 수익(ARR)은 자동 갱신되는 구독 또는 계약을 통해 매년 고객으로부터 발생하는 수익을 말합니다.

회사가 고객에게 매월 요금을 청구하는 경우 수익은 일반적으로 ARR 대신 MRR(월별 반복 수익)로 보고됩니다.