Wait What Glossary

Reference for all important terms covered across all our editions.

Raising, Raised 📈 (refresher): A startup ‘takes’ money from investors over a period of time, at different stages of its life. Each time they take this money, its referred to as Funding round; or you can say they Raised the money.

Series A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H: A startup takes (raises) money from investors over a period of time, at different stages of its life. Each time they raise (take) this money 💸, the money they get gets classified as a “Series”. They start from Pre-Seed, Seed, to Series A, Series B.. and so on all they way to Z.

Going Public, Listing, Listed 💹: Most companies begin life as a Private company. This simply means that the Shares of the company are not bought and sold freely. When a company says they are going ‘public’ or that they are ‘listing’, this means that they are now making available their shares to be bought and sold by anyone in the public.

IPO: In an IPO or Initial Public Offering, a company offers a combination of existing shares and new shares for sale to the public, for the first time. An IPO usually involves a whole lot of intermediaries like investment bankers.

Direct Listing: A Direct listing 📈 is another way of going public. Its different to an IPO. In a direct listing the company typically offers existing shares for sale and does not use intermediaries like banks.

Acquired 🤗: When a company buys another company. If company A bought company B, then one can say that Company A ‘acquired’ Company B 🤷.

Valuation (refresher): Simply put valuation is the value of a company 💰. There are many things that go into deciding the valuation of a company, but the most important bits are Revenue or Profit they make. Value of the company is derived by multiplying their Revenue or Profit by a “multiple”. That multiple can be 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x 10x, 100x or anyX the Revenue or Profits. 🤯

Unicorn: Other than the mythical creature many of us love 🦄, the term Unicorn is used for a Startup that is worth $1 Billion. How do you decide the worth or value or “valuation” of a startup? Ask Mom or a big person at home.

Bootstrapped: When you build a company without taking any money from investors. 🙇‍♂️🙇‍♂️🙇‍♂️

Financial Year: A Financial year or a Fiscal year is a year through which companies report how much money they make, their profits/losses etc. The financial year is different to a normal calendar year and starts in some countries from 1st April or 5th April.

Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 (Q = Quarter): A ‘quarter’ like every other quarter is 1/4th but of a Financial Year. Businesses report their performance by each Quarter of the year, divided into 4 sets of 3 months each. For e.g. January, February, March is usually Q1 in the US, but Q4 in India 🥴.

SaaS: Software as a Service. Digital products or software 💻 that we use by paying a monthly or annual subscription 💲 are called SaaS products. For e.g. Microsoft Word, Gmail for work, Slack and many other products are SaaS products.

NFT (useful later): NFT or Non Fungible Tokens are a way to own, and trace ownership of, a digital file. The word ‘Fungible’ means ‘Interchangeable’, hence ‘non-fungible’ is used to signify something that is unique and cannot be changed. You can pretty much NFT anything. We’ve covered NFTs that include a sound💨 (early readers will remember 🤣), the world wide web’s source code, and also an entire company.

Revenue: In the most basic terms, Revenue is the amount of money a company makes. Revenue can be calculated Monthly or Annually (for the year). Sometimes you will hear that a company is on track for “annualised” Revenue of $X.. this simply means that ‘over the next one year’ they will make $X. But Revenue is not entirely that simple.. see the chart below:

Earnings: Earnings is the Profit 💰 a company makes before it pays tax. Every quarter, companies that are listed share their results including how they did on Revenues, Earnings and other important metrics like users; this time period is referred to as Earnings Season or Earnings Week.

Economy: An economy is an area, or a region, where production and consumption of goods and services takes place. The Economy of a country therefore includes ALL the money made and transacted for all of the goods and services produced in that region. In some ways, the resulting revenue is called the GDP 👇.

GDP: Gross Domestic Product is the total Revenue generated by ALL goods and services sold in a country. Ask Mom or a big person at home what are Goods and what are Services?

Market Size: Market size is nothing but the overall Revenue 💸 every company makes or can potentially make ‘all together’ for a particular industry or product. So when we say social media is a $100 billion market, that means all social media companies put together make revenue of $100 billion. Its always measured on an annual basis, i.e. the Revenue made in one year.

Market: In the economic sense, Market refers to the number of people that can become users, or revenue that can be made, with a product, category or industry.

Cryptocurrency, Bitcoins: Cryptocurrencies for e.g. Bitcoin are digital currency created, and owned, by the people. Usually currencies, be they $ or £ or ₹, are created by the Government of a country; for e.g. Bitcoins have been created by a person(s) rumoured to be known as Satoshi 🥷. They are not always considered to be a legal currency.

Marketplace: A marketplace is a space, physical or virtual (on the internet), where buyers and sellers meet, to buy and sell products to each other 🤷. Amazon is one such marketplace, but there are a ton more, especially those that are meant for businesses to buy from one another 🤝. Read about one such in Stocks, Stonks.

Patent: A patent is a type of right, given to an inventor, that disallows anyone else from making a similar solution or product, without their consent. This is a slightly simplistic way of putting it though.. since a patent doesn’t really patent an idea, but a method.

Trademark: A trademark is nothing but a sign, name or logo that represents your product. Companies can register a trademark for e.g. their brand name and/or logo so that other companies can’t use the same logos and names for their products. Whats a brand name? Ask mom or a big person at home.

Anti-trust: This one is super confusing, but hey we’re here just for that. Whenever you hear the term anti-trust, know that what they really mean is anti-competition. Now what is anti-competition? Essentially, any action, practise, or move that reduces competition is called anti-competitive. For e.g. because Apple owns and runs its App Store for iOS apps, and does not allow anyone else to run an App Store for iOS apps, it is an anti-competitive practise.

Social Media: A place, or specifically a website or app, where any person can share information, views, updates and, interact with other persons is a social media site or app. Social Media is an over $100 billion market, and includes companies like Facebook that own facebok.com, Whatsapp and Instagram.