TL;DR
- Learning the language of an industry matters, but knowing how to adapt it for different audiences can create a meaningful advantage.
- Clear language helps investors, customers, and partners understand why an idea is relevant to them.
- A strong opportunity can still be overlooked when its value is explained in a way that feels too technical or distant. Familiar language creates a sense of safety, especially in a high-risk context such as venture capital.
- Product-market fit may begin with language-market fit: before people choose a product, they need to understand it and recognize themselves in the problem it solves.
When I joined Venture Institute, I expected to learn how venture capital funds are built, how investments are assessed, and what it takes to move into the industry.
The program takes participants through the principles, processes, and decisions behind venture capital. It also includes some less exciting tasks.
One of them was creating a glossary of VC terms.
At first, it felt like an administrative exercise. There were many expressions to define, and most of them seemed obvious once you had spent enough time around startups and investors. I’ve been sharing parts of the experience here.
But while working on it, I realized that the glossary was not only about learning the language.
It was also about learning when not to use it.
1. Learning the language is only the first step
Every industry develops its own vocabulary.
In venture capital, people talk about moats, carry, deal flow, follow-on rounds, power laws, and investment theses. A useful overview of some of these terms can be found here). These terms help people inside the industry communicate faster.
They can also create distance.
When everyone in the room understands the same language, technical terms can make a conversation more precise. But when the person in front of you comes from a different background, the same terms can make a simple idea sound more complicated than it is.
This matters because founders and investors rarely speak only to people who think exactly like them.
Founders speak to customers, employees, corporate partners, and investors. Fund managers speak to founders, family offices, institutions, operators, and potential limited partners.
Each person enters the conversation with a different level of knowledge, a different context, and a different reason for listening.
Using the right language is therefore not only a communication skill. It can become a form of market fit.
2. The right words depend on the person in front of you
A founder may describe a company’s advantage as a “moat” when speaking to investors. In a conversation with a corporate buyer, “differentiator” may be easier to understand. The meaning is similar. The language is adapted to the audience.
The same applies to products. While “We are building an operating system for cooking that helps people plan meals, decide what to eat, shop, and cook” may sound ambitious for investors, “We make cooking at home easier” is immediately clear to users.
The first version explains the structure of the solution. The second explains why someone might care.
Both may be true. But they do not create the same connection in every context.
People are more likely to engage with an idea when they can quickly understand what it means for them. Technical language may demonstrate expertise, but clarity makes that expertise usable.
If the person in front of you has to translate every sentence, much of the message is already lost.
3. Clear language can change the outcome
I saw this happen while supporting one of the startups I had invested in.
Initially, I was one of only two angels in the community interested in joining the round. Later, I presented the opportunity to the wider group. I was not changing the business, the market, or the investment case. I was simply explaining why I found it interesting in a way that connected with the people listening.
Following that conversation, six more angels decided to invest.
Of course, language was not the only reason. The company and the opportunity still had to be strong—and they were. Since we decided to invest, the team has secured new partnerships, demonstrated resilience, and grown both its team and its revenue.
But the experience reminded me that a good opportunity can remain unnoticed when its value is not expressed in a way people can easily understand. Sometimes the person closest to the product is not the person best placed to translate it.
Founders naturally speak from inside the company. They know every feature, decision, challenge, and future possibility. Investors, customers, and partners encounter the idea from the outside.
The gap between those two perspectives is often a gap in both language and context.
Closing it can make the difference between someone hearing the pitch and someone seeing the opportunity.
4. Familiar language creates safety
Our brains naturally look for what feels familiar and understandable.
When something feels unnecessarily complex, we may interpret that complexity as distance, uncertainty, or risk. This is especially relevant in venture capital and startups, where many decisions are already made with incomplete information.
Investors are assessing people, markets, assumptions, and future potential. Customers are assessing whether a new product is useful and trustworthy. Corporate partners are assessing whether a young company understands their needs and can operate within their environment.
In each case, clear language reduces some of the friction. It does not remove the risk. It simply makes the opportunity easier to process.
This is why the ability to translate complex ideas into simple words can become a meaningful advantage.
Not because simple language makes the idea less sophisticated, but because it allows more people to understand it, trust it, and respond to it.
5. A lesson from working across 60 countries
I experienced something similar in my previous global transformation roles.
I was managing change across teams in around 60 countries. It was not enough to design a good process or communicate a clear strategy from headquarters.
People needed to understand what the change meant for their own work.
The language had to be simple enough to travel across countries, functions, and levels of seniority. And when a shared language was not enough, the message had to be translated locally.
The goal was not to make the work sound impressive. The goal was to make sure people understood what to do.
That experience changed how I think about communication.
A message is not clear simply because the person delivering it believes it is. It is clear when the person receiving it can understand it and act on it.
The same principle applies to founders and investors.
A pitch is not effective simply because it uses the right industry vocabulary. It is effective when the person listening can see the opportunity, understand its relevance, and know what decision is being asked of them.
6. From learning the language to translating it
In my previous article on angel investing for future founders, I explored the value of learning how companies are assessed before deciding to build one.
Learning the language of venture capital can be a useful first step. It helps founders understand how investors think. It helps emerging investors participate in industry conversations. And it makes unfamiliar concepts easier to navigate.
But knowing the language is only part of the work. The more valuable skill may be moving between them.
It means being able to speak to an investor about returns, scalability, and defensibility, while speaking to a customer about a problem they experience every day.
It means being able to explain an investment thesis to an experienced fund manager, but also to someone investing in a fund for the first time.
It means understanding the technical term without becoming dependent on it.
This ability can support fundraising, customer discovery, product-market fit, and investment thesis validation.
In each case, the question is similar: can the person in front of me understand why this matters?
Perspective:
We often think of product-market fit as the moment when a product finds real demand. But perhaps that process starts earlier.
Before people can want a product, invest in it, recommend it, or adopt it, they first need to understand it.
And understanding does not begin with the product itself. It begins with the words used to describe the problem, the value, and the change it creates.
This does not mean simplifying the business until important details disappear. It means finding the clearest possible expression of what is already true.
The language may change depending on who is listening.
- An investor may need to understand the scale of the opportunity.
- A corporate buyer may need to understand the business impact.
- A user may simply need to understand how the product makes life easier.
The product remains the same. The entry point changes.
Perhaps product-market fit starts with language-market fit. Before the market can choose a product, it needs to recognize itself in the way that product is explained.