Here's the biggest offenders I see when talking to founders:
revenue vs GMV
(if you give GMV, give me your cut/margin)
contract vs LOI
burn vs expenses
users vs customers
(customers pay)
signups vs users vs active users
(you should give active with time interval and measurement of active.
eg. logged in last 30 days)
profitable vs cash flow positive
Others people should know:
diff between retention rate vs churn rate
(both should be given with time interval.
eg. 30 day retention rate is...
monthly churn rate is...)
voluntary churn vs involuntary churn
gross vs net
top line vs bottom line
I've probably been guilty of this but I think revenue & GMV can be confusing terms based on how a lot of commerce works via the internet. For reference, our company used to do dropship e-commerce.
Amazon, for example, uses revenue for first party sales and GMV for third party marketplace, Amazon never owns the product in third party marketplace. If you are a dropship retailer though, you have flash ownership because you buy from the dropship wholesaler and then you sell to the customer using a marketplace or website. You could say Amazon is different here because they physically have the products, but with net payment terms up to and past 180 days, it really isn't much different.
Also, if you just consider revenue to be your cut of GMV and you have net payment terms that gives your company high free cash flow, that seems important to distinguish as well.
[Update] The main point of my post is to show how confusing these terms are in one instance, and every business is different so it is really important to clearly define how you use the terms you are using
I am not an accountant - I was looking most of these up so do let me know if I got something wrong and I'll edit as needed. Just trying to compile things in one place.
Gross Merchandise Value is how much money flows through your system while Revenue is how much lands in your bank account. For instance, a payments processor like Stripe might have a GMV of $100 million while their revenue would only be the 3% commission (in this case $3 million).
A contract is a legally binding and enforceable document. A letter of intent is when one party outlines what they are likely or would like to do - with some bits of it being enforceable like non-disclosure agreements. A memorandum of understanding is a letter of intent signed by all parties involved - it is still non-binding. A term sheet from a VC is like an LOI - however, it doesn't actually happen until after due diligence, negotiation, etc and only official when signed.
Burn rate is the delta in your bank account. Expenses is how much money left your bank account and revenue is how much entered. Thus burn rate is expenses - revenue and is -1 * profit.
Users are people on your site. Customers are paying users.
Signups are how many people created an account. Active users are how many people logged in over a certain period of time.
Cash flow positive means you have more in your bank account than you did before. However, a kickstarter which raised 1 million would be cash flow positive but not be profitable as it has many outstanding obligations.
Churn rate is the percentage of your users/customers who left over a certain duration. Retention is 1-churn.
Involuntary churn is when the customer leaves because they go out of business or in the case of dating apps, no longer need your services. Voluntary churn is all other churn.
Gross refers revenue - expenses of the product. Net is revenue - expense of the product - administrative costs - depreciation - payroll taxes etc.
Top line is referring to gross while bottom line refers to net. Top line growth means more revenue and bottom line growth means cost cutting.
Interesting...been in finance all my life & dealt with pretty much every industry out there...never heard this one before. Must be some type of startup slang so to speak.
What's voluntary vs involuntary churn? (googling but if anyone wants to save me the time) :)
A: Voluntary churn occurs due to a decision by the customer to switch to another company or service provider, involuntary churn occurs due to circumstances such as a customer's relocation to a long-term care facility, death, or the relocation to a distant location.
IANAL, and Sam mentioned a felony charge. Are there any legal protections for investors (or.... whoever this is protecting) for e.g. misrepresenting "signups vs users vs active users"? Surely that falls under subjective fraud rather than a straight up objective lie, especially for sites e.g. reddit where the line between "active user" and "lurker" is extremely murky.
Mr. Altman is talking about the basic misunderstanding of these terms and it's surprising to me that he didn't take a bit of time to define the terms himself. Maybe I'm naive and those terms are a lot harder to define than I'm imagining, but even then some references linking to other sites could have been provided.
I really enjoy reading Sam's posts and I'm usually bookmarking and/or forwarding his articles to a ton of friends. This one is a nice amuse-bouche but I guess I'm use to getting a full meal from Sam. Maybe a quick update with some links is all it needs? Good read otherwise.
I agree. I'm a CPA and some of these terms (GMV) I've never heard before (must be because I'm in a different industry - payments, and we use TPV - total payment volume), and others (burn) are ambiguous to my accounting brain.
Is that cash flow used to fund operations? Is that the accrual based operating expenses? Is that the difference in cash between this month and last month?
I think the point is less these particular terms and more the general responsibility to know and use the accounting terminology properly. Sam probably has a dozen examples of financial terminology errors, of varying seriousness and intent, and startup models, by definition, are going to raise still more questions. Sam can't possibly lay out a definitive vocabulary -- the applications of these terms is always dependent on the particular business. He can raise a flag that founders have to take this stuff seriously.
Whether this is exactly the best post for that is maybe another question. It definitely raises the question of how, exactly, founders without any accounting are supposed to navigate this stuff. Accounting is a language of its own, whose conventions make sense once you understand the various problems it must solve, but absent that knowledge it is very easy for people to make innocent but very important mistakes.
I think the more important thing is to make sure that a company clearly defines exactly what it means by certain financial terms. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC during the original .com boom Priceline counted the entire sales price of an airline ticket as "revenue", which should clearly be considered GMV. More recently, I've seen terms like "gross revenue" and "net revenue" used by the financial press to describe total booking volume vs the cut a company takes.
Isn't it also surprising that investors aren't taking the time to define and clarify these terms as well? I feel this shouldn't fall entirely on a founder's shoulders unless they're intentionally lying.
This post sounds fishy to me. If the "financial statements" are sufficiently important for the fine details to matter, then they need to be produced by someone who knows exactly what they are doing (a properly qualified accountant). If they aren't important (why are the financial statements for a YC _applicant_ important?? surely they have zero revenue typically and nobody believes their projections), then who cares if the terminology is slightly wrong? Certainly if I were given such a document, I'd ask who prepared it and go from there as regards how accurate I expected it to be.
Also, if your role is an incubator investor, isn't it your job to educate the inexperienced founders about things like this?
fwiw I don't understand how anyone could confuse LOI with executed contract. I mean, really the only way that the concept of a LOI can arise is when you ask "can we get a contract in place?" and the answer is "not at this time" so you counter with "how about an LOI?". Hard to get confused about that..
There are so many startup accelerators that take a team of engineers / product people and do their best to make businesspeople out of them. I'm one of those CEOs, for sure, and learning about the financial world, accounting, and trying to make sure to not mis-speak was quite difficult.
The primary training I received during the accelerator helped a lot, but it was more along the lines of how to more accurately model in excel. It was up to the CEO (?CFO? if you're lucky) to get all this exactly right, and it's not easy.
I think that when an accelerator knows that its teams are not well-versed in the financial part of running a startup, there should be more emphasis on helping them learn. It's daunting to try to do that alone.
I agree with Sam's message, but I sympathize with founders who make mistakes here.
Founders are told to hustle, to aggressively push themselves and their visions in order to build momentum for their businesses. Founders are encouraged to bend - if not break - the rules in order to get things done.
First-time founders are thrown into the world of finance with a good deal of ignorance about the meanings and conventions of specific financial terms, combined with a culturally ingrained bias towards spinning things as positively as possible. Broadly speaking, this seems like a recipe for disaster.
This is yet another way in which Y Combinator can differentiate themselves as a place for startups. A once a week course on this type of material would probably be very useful for most founders, I'm working under the assumption that most Y Combinator founders are first time founders.
As a side note, it feels like this type of communication straddles the boundary between something that could have been a tweet vs a blog post.
Interesting idea: VCs should have in-house finance folks specifically meant to work with portfolio companies who spent a few days a month for year 1 after investment, or until the company gets it own finance team. Most VCs do less than 10-15 deals a year, so this seems tolerable and a relatively low cost way of to really know what's going on with the portfolio. (I know some VCs already kind of do this (Vantage Point). Also, harder for YC, given # of investments, so maybe not as applicable for true seed funds but still might be worth it - I'm sure they could get 5 mid-career CPAs for the price of one partner, and they would love the job! I think)
The fun part is that then the VCs will have a direct line into the company's nitty-gritty operations, which really they are entitled to receive anyhow (though usually they just take the board deck at its word..which is not always good).
This might suck for the company since you have the VC in-the-know on your nitty-gritty (though I'd argue that if you don't want them in-the-know, you should not have taken their $$...though I understand it's more complicated than that haha), BUT that might also serve to incentivize the company to build out the finance team quickly, and also give the management team a taste of what a good finance person can provide (assuming the person the VC provides is good, which they should be if they are to be trusted with multiple portfolio companies).
There are honest and competent people willing to work one day a week as contract CFO. Such a person works as part of the management team and doesn't have divided loyalty (management / investors).
> Interesting idea: VCs should have in-house finance folks specifically meant to work with portfolio companies who spent a few days a month for year 1 after investment, or until the company gets it own finance team.
Doesn't a16z already do this, not just for finance, but also for PR, hiring, etc.?
We always put a new CFO in the company. But non of them are from the VC firm.
This method you talk about is way more commom on large deal, like Private Equity, LBO, etc. Those companies make 2 to 4 deals a year. 10-15 deals isn't a small number of deals.
I've seen early stage VCs suggest hiring temp CFOs (though it didn't pan out for Virtual - highlighting that the onus is still on the CEO) and late stage VCs saying, "We'll give you $25 million, but we hire the CFO"
As an engineer it's pretty easy to get used to dismissing opinions about technology from people that don't understand it. At times that's reasonable, but it's also easy to take it way too far.
Sam seems to have a healthy respect for his own ignorance, and encourages others do to do the same, particularly in areas where that ignorance can have significant practical consequences. That's not "amusing", it's commendable.
This post leaves a bad taste in my mouth, at least to the degree it's talking about executives of YC companies.
I mean, the whole model of YC is to take kids straight out of college (if not before) and turn them into startup CEOs. If those CEOs come out of that process not understanding the legal obligations of their new position, whose fault is that, exactly? It's not like they're bringing decades of business experience to the gig. The only thing they know about what being a CEO requires is what YC teaches them.
If their only preparation for the post is YC, and they're ending up ignorant of stuff that could get them slapped with a felony charge, I would think that would say more about YC than it does about them.
My impression of YC has never been that it is some hand-holding after school special. This is an investment firm in the world of business and the world of business is very serious. As a startup founder, you are treated as an adult and that includes both the freedoms and responsibilities implied.
That said, you may have a point here. If there is a recurring issue that some founders are too immature for their own good and might be a risk to their own personal safety (e.g., committing felonies out of pure ignorance), YC should probably be intentional about filtering those people out during applications. But this article isn't just about YC candidates and that's not a solution for the whole industry.
It's not YC's job to teach executives anything. Their entire model is self-service: they give founders access to people who know this stuff, but you have to ask for help to receive it. At the same time, a lot of these founders don't know what they don't know, so IMO this blog post is a way of saying to current and prospective founders "Hey, you need to be careful about this because creative accounting is often illegal". The startup mindset is to find creative solutions to problems, but that doesn't work in finance/accounting.
> I mean, the whole model of YC is to take kids straight out of college
Isn't the average age of YC founders closer to 30?
At what point do people start acting like grown-ups who take the time to learn what responsibilities come with their actions?
I think college graduates certainly qualify. If I'm going to call myself "CEO" then I better damn well figure out what that means, and if I don't know, I should study or seek the advice of someone who does.
The average age of founders in YC startups is 29, that's not really straight out of college. I think you might actually have misconceptions of what YC does. It's not a school for sure.
"I’ve seen people use GMV for revenue or refer to an LOI as a contract many times in the past year when talking to investors. This is a felony."
This is only a problem when you're asking investors for more money. That's when you need an accountant to review what you're telling them. You need an accountant and a lawyer at that point anyway, or you're going to get screwed.
It doesn't specifically address the terms in the OP, but it should be the starting point for non-MBAs (like myself) to start understanding basic Finance.
In my experience, if you're a co-founder and you don't understand basic Finance and let your Finance department do whatever it's doing you may be setting yourself up for trouble. The OP described the other case of simply saying non-sense because you don't understand the terms :)
> One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator applicants a couple of years ago [...] I’ve seen people use GMV for revenue or refer to an LOI as a contract many times in the past year when talking to investors. This is a felony.
Not sure who the target audience is. If a business person is willfully deceiving people, let's call that out. But if a programmer is using financial jargon they don't understand, then let's educate them.
It's not hard to read this blog post and come away believing that if you use the wrong acronym accidentally the author thinks you're a felon. I'm sure that's an overstatement, but overall this could have been an article that was educational yet had a serious warning. Instead it kind of stirs drama and fear. That's fine but I can't help but compare PG's essays which are a delight to read and get lost in.
This is probably a too-broad-brush use of the word.
Other than that, I like this essay.
People should be taught financial literacy early and accurately. Like learning maths notation: It's useful, compact and efficient. But...it must be precisely grasped/implemented to be of any benefit to speaker or the audience.
I like Sam, and I even agree with him in this post. However, I don't think everything he blogs about needs to shoot straight to the number one spot on HN. I'm not sure if this is the community's voting or the YC algorithm's bias, but it would benefit the community if we could stop the fawning and treat his posts like we would anyone else's.
> This year, the firm expects to clock $10.84 billion in revenue which — calculating the 20 percent commission that it takes — should bring in around $2 billion in revenue for the year.
[+] [-] kevin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsugarman|10 years ago|reply
Amazon, for example, uses revenue for first party sales and GMV for third party marketplace, Amazon never owns the product in third party marketplace. If you are a dropship retailer though, you have flash ownership because you buy from the dropship wholesaler and then you sell to the customer using a marketplace or website. You could say Amazon is different here because they physically have the products, but with net payment terms up to and past 180 days, it really isn't much different.
Also, if you just consider revenue to be your cut of GMV and you have net payment terms that gives your company high free cash flow, that seems important to distinguish as well.
[Update] The main point of my post is to show how confusing these terms are in one instance, and every business is different so it is really important to clearly define how you use the terms you are using
[+] [-] liyanchang|10 years ago|reply
Gross Merchandise Value is how much money flows through your system while Revenue is how much lands in your bank account. For instance, a payments processor like Stripe might have a GMV of $100 million while their revenue would only be the 3% commission (in this case $3 million).
A contract is a legally binding and enforceable document. A letter of intent is when one party outlines what they are likely or would like to do - with some bits of it being enforceable like non-disclosure agreements. A memorandum of understanding is a letter of intent signed by all parties involved - it is still non-binding. A term sheet from a VC is like an LOI - however, it doesn't actually happen until after due diligence, negotiation, etc and only official when signed.
Burn rate is the delta in your bank account. Expenses is how much money left your bank account and revenue is how much entered. Thus burn rate is expenses - revenue and is -1 * profit.
Users are people on your site. Customers are paying users.
Signups are how many people created an account. Active users are how many people logged in over a certain period of time.
Cash flow positive means you have more in your bank account than you did before. However, a kickstarter which raised 1 million would be cash flow positive but not be profitable as it has many outstanding obligations.
Churn rate is the percentage of your users/customers who left over a certain duration. Retention is 1-churn.
Involuntary churn is when the customer leaves because they go out of business or in the case of dating apps, no longer need your services. Voluntary churn is all other churn.
Gross refers revenue - expenses of the product. Net is revenue - expense of the product - administrative costs - depreciation - payroll taxes etc.
Top line is referring to gross while bottom line refers to net. Top line growth means more revenue and bottom line growth means cost cutting.
[+] [-] Havoc|10 years ago|reply
Interesting...been in finance all my life & dealt with pretty much every industry out there...never heard this one before. Must be some type of startup slang so to speak.
[+] [-] randall|10 years ago|reply
A: Voluntary churn occurs due to a decision by the customer to switch to another company or service provider, involuntary churn occurs due to circumstances such as a customer's relocation to a long-term care facility, death, or the relocation to a distant location.
from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_attrition
[+] [-] duaneb|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: Clearly I have no understanding of fraud.
[+] [-] far33d|10 years ago|reply
If you sign up a $120k yearly contract, you have $120k in bookings, but can only recognize $10k of revenue each month.
[+] [-] ISL|10 years ago|reply
"Your burn rate is the speed at which your cash balance is going down."
http://avc.com/2011/12/burn-rate/
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] antaviana|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evo_9|10 years ago|reply
I really enjoy reading Sam's posts and I'm usually bookmarking and/or forwarding his articles to a ton of friends. This one is a nice amuse-bouche but I guess I'm use to getting a full meal from Sam. Maybe a quick update with some links is all it needs? Good read otherwise.
[+] [-] skilbjo|10 years ago|reply
Is that cash flow used to fund operations? Is that the accrual based operating expenses? Is that the difference in cash between this month and last month?
[+] [-] chernevik|10 years ago|reply
Whether this is exactly the best post for that is maybe another question. It definitely raises the question of how, exactly, founders without any accounting are supposed to navigate this stuff. Accounting is a language of its own, whose conventions make sense once you understand the various problems it must solve, but absent that knowledge it is very easy for people to make innocent but very important mistakes.
[+] [-] adevine|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pitt1980|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atom-morgan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|10 years ago|reply
Also, if your role is an incubator investor, isn't it your job to educate the inexperienced founders about things like this?
fwiw I don't understand how anyone could confuse LOI with executed contract. I mean, really the only way that the concept of a LOI can arise is when you ask "can we get a contract in place?" and the answer is "not at this time" so you counter with "how about an LOI?". Hard to get confused about that..
[+] [-] cryptoz|10 years ago|reply
The primary training I received during the accelerator helped a lot, but it was more along the lines of how to more accurately model in excel. It was up to the CEO (?CFO? if you're lucky) to get all this exactly right, and it's not easy.
I think that when an accelerator knows that its teams are not well-versed in the financial part of running a startup, there should be more emphasis on helping them learn. It's daunting to try to do that alone.
[+] [-] tkiley|10 years ago|reply
Founders are told to hustle, to aggressively push themselves and their visions in order to build momentum for their businesses. Founders are encouraged to bend - if not break - the rules in order to get things done.
First-time founders are thrown into the world of finance with a good deal of ignorance about the meanings and conventions of specific financial terms, combined with a culturally ingrained bias towards spinning things as positively as possible. Broadly speaking, this seems like a recipe for disaster.
[+] [-] someear|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|10 years ago|reply
Color me stupid, but I am sure the vast majority of founders know exactly what they are doing when they give GVM in place of revenue.
For example no one would buy a home for $200M, sell it for $201M and say I made $201M last year.
[+] [-] t23|10 years ago|reply
Financial Intelligence (http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Intelligence-Revised-Edition...)
Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs (http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Intelligence-Entrepreneurs-R...)
[+] [-] mynegation|10 years ago|reply
http://www.investopedia.com/ is helpful for occasional reference
[+] [-] rglover|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|10 years ago|reply
for people like me who weren't aware of the term.
This is yet another way in which Y Combinator can differentiate themselves as a place for startups. A once a week course on this type of material would probably be very useful for most founders, I'm working under the assumption that most Y Combinator founders are first time founders.
As a side note, it feels like this type of communication straddles the boundary between something that could have been a tweet vs a blog post.
[+] [-] joshjkim|10 years ago|reply
The fun part is that then the VCs will have a direct line into the company's nitty-gritty operations, which really they are entitled to receive anyhow (though usually they just take the board deck at its word..which is not always good).
This might suck for the company since you have the VC in-the-know on your nitty-gritty (though I'd argue that if you don't want them in-the-know, you should not have taken their $$...though I understand it's more complicated than that haha), BUT that might also serve to incentivize the company to build out the finance team quickly, and also give the management team a taste of what a good finance person can provide (assuming the person the VC provides is good, which they should be if they are to be trusted with multiple portfolio companies).
[+] [-] OliverJones|10 years ago|reply
There are honest and competent people willing to work one day a week as contract CFO. Such a person works as part of the management team and doesn't have divided loyalty (management / investors).
[+] [-] w1ntermute|10 years ago|reply
Doesn't a16z already do this, not just for finance, but also for PR, hiring, etc.?
[+] [-] dudurocha|10 years ago|reply
This method you talk about is way more commom on large deal, like Private Equity, LBO, etc. Those companies make 2 to 4 deals a year. 10-15 deals isn't a small number of deals.
[+] [-] mathattack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|10 years ago|reply
> I can't read a balance sheet or income statement or anything like that. I have to have someone explain it to me, every Board meeting.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/07/sam_altman_on_s.htm...
[+] [-] domdip|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwp|10 years ago|reply
Sam seems to have a healthy respect for his own ignorance, and encourages others do to do the same, particularly in areas where that ignorance can have significant practical consequences. That's not "amusing", it's commendable.
[+] [-] smacktoward|10 years ago|reply
I mean, the whole model of YC is to take kids straight out of college (if not before) and turn them into startup CEOs. If those CEOs come out of that process not understanding the legal obligations of their new position, whose fault is that, exactly? It's not like they're bringing decades of business experience to the gig. The only thing they know about what being a CEO requires is what YC teaches them.
If their only preparation for the post is YC, and they're ending up ignorant of stuff that could get them slapped with a felony charge, I would think that would say more about YC than it does about them.
[+] [-] tobyjsullivan|10 years ago|reply
That said, you may have a point here. If there is a recurring issue that some founders are too immature for their own good and might be a risk to their own personal safety (e.g., committing felonies out of pure ignorance), YC should probably be intentional about filtering those people out during applications. But this article isn't just about YC candidates and that's not a solution for the whole industry.
[+] [-] exelius|10 years ago|reply
> I mean, the whole model of YC is to take kids straight out of college
Isn't the average age of YC founders closer to 30?
[+] [-] ams6110|10 years ago|reply
I think college graduates certainly qualify. If I'm going to call myself "CEO" then I better damn well figure out what that means, and if I don't know, I should study or seek the advice of someone who does.
[+] [-] LandoCalrissian|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
This is only a problem when you're asking investors for more money. That's when you need an accountant to review what you're telling them. You need an accountant and a lawyer at that point anyway, or you're going to get screwed.
[+] [-] zaidf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Maro|10 years ago|reply
https://hbr.org/product/hbr-guide-to-finance-basics-for-mana...
It doesn't specifically address the terms in the OP, but it should be the starting point for non-MBAs (like myself) to start understanding basic Finance.
In my experience, if you're a co-founder and you don't understand basic Finance and let your Finance department do whatever it's doing you may be setting yourself up for trouble. The OP described the other case of simply saying non-sense because you don't understand the terms :)
[+] [-] sama|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logn|10 years ago|reply
Not sure who the target audience is. If a business person is willfully deceiving people, let's call that out. But if a programmer is using financial jargon they don't understand, then let's educate them.
It's not hard to read this blog post and come away believing that if you use the wrong acronym accidentally the author thinks you're a felon. I'm sure that's an overstatement, but overall this could have been an article that was educational yet had a serious warning. Instead it kind of stirs drama and fear. That's fine but I can't help but compare PG's essays which are a delight to read and get lost in.
[+] [-] 001sky|10 years ago|reply
This is probably a too-broad-brush use of the word.
Other than that, I like this essay.
People should be taught financial literacy early and accurately. Like learning maths notation: It's useful, compact and efficient. But...it must be precisely grasped/implemented to be of any benefit to speaker or the audience.
[+] [-] pyrrhotech|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
This is incorrect. Fraud requires intent. Otherwise it's just negligence.
Should probably throw a legal dictionary in with the financial one.
[+] [-] davidw|10 years ago|reply
http://feld.com/archives/2015/07/dont-try-fake-language.html
[+] [-] jdoliner|10 years ago|reply
> This year, the firm expects to clock $10.84 billion in revenue which — calculating the 20 percent commission that it takes — should bring in around $2 billion in revenue for the year.
[+] [-] jamram82|10 years ago|reply