

Do You Speak VCili? (like Swahili, but more difficult to learn) - acav
http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/do-you-speak-vc/

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pg
You can translate most of VC-speak with just 2 rules:

1\. "Here is a termsheet." -> "Here is a termsheet."

2\. * -> "No."

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KMinshew
“I don’t really get what you are doing, but if someone really popular invests
in you, I’ll follow blindly.” --> I have seen this happen so many times it's
not funny

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celoyd
Off-topically, it’s a little odd to pick Swahili as a byword for a weird
language for an English-speaker. It’s a popular second language (which tends
to sand down a language’s most complex features), it’s written in the Latin
alphabet, it has borrowed vocabulary from European languages including
English, and it contains no unfamiliar sounds – unlike, say, Mandarin, French
or German.

Like any language short of Ido, it has its tricky parts. But all in all it’s
probably among the easiest non-Indo-European languages for an Anglophone to
pick up. Not the best symbol of the abstruse.

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tesseract
To English speakers, Greek is the traditional exemplar of incomprehensibility.

See also <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/graph2.png>

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daeken
My girlfriend has been teaching me Greek for a little while, and I agree
wholeheartedly. There are still sounds I simply can't make; it definitely
serves as a great source of entertainment for her, though.

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100k
It used to be worse. Ancient Greek had tonal accents, instead of just stresses
as now.

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Ancient_Greek...](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Ancient_Greek#Tonal_Accents)

I learned this reading "Empires of the Word", a book recommended in the HN
2011 best books thread.

[http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-
World/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-
World/dp/0066210860)

~~~
celoyd
I took a semester or two of Ancient Greek, and it wasn’t a walk in the park,
but it also wasn’t a headache.

It’s the Indo-Europeanness: it’s full of cognate vocabulary and even
idioms,[0] and while it has some new grammar, its basic structure is
reasonably familiar. It doesn’t do anything freaky (to an Anglophone) like,
say, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative–absolutive_language> or what
Wikipedia says about the Salishan languages:

 _They are characterised by agglutinativity and astonishing consonant clusters
— for instance the Nuxálk word xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ (IPA:
[xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]) meaning ‘he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry
plant’ has thirteen obstruent consonants in a row with no vowels._

A-Greek is nothing like this. And its tones are different from the ones in,
e.g., Mandarin in that they’re almost never the only way of distinguishing
words. It’s rare that _ábà_ means one thing and _àbá_ means an unrelated
thing. Plus, a word’s tones are reasonably predictable from the way it’s
spelled (about like stress in English or Spanish), so you just learn the tones
as part of the word and then you don’t really have to think about them much.
It’s trickier than not having tones, but not by much.

0\. For a trivial example, if you translate _I have in mind to overperform_ in
a naïve word-by-word way to A-Greek, it would end up perfectly idiomatic: both
_to have in mind_ and the pervasive figurative use of _over_ and _under_ (
_hyper_ and _hypo_ ) are the same.

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nirvana
I know that many people see VC funding as some sort of holy grail, but given
my experience over the past several decades, it is the last form of funding I
want to take.

These days the internet provides infrastructure and distribution and a
marketing medium, and open source removes much of the capital costs for a
software or internet startup.

I think everyone should be trying to get to profitability around the time they
start needing to do a second angel round, or ideally before they get out of an
accelerator.

In most cases you don't need to hire a dozen engineers before getting
profitability, even on a small scale, and if your idea is scalable, you can
raise reasonably big rounds with angels these days (though I've not been thru
an angel round, I'm assuming the terms are much more reasonable and the
process more straightforward.)

I hope to be profitable very quickly, and to plow those profits into growth
%100. If we do raise outside funding, I'd like to do like PandoDaily did and
have a syndicate of a dozen or more angels.

