Business Concepts & Jargon Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the number of months a startup can keep operating before it runs out of money, given how much cash it has in the bank and how fast it is spending it each month net of any revenue?

Question 2

What is the name for a company that exists mainly to own controlling stakes in other companies rather than to make or sell anything itself?

Question 3

What is the name for the detailed investigation that a buyer, investor or lender carries out into a target company's finances, contracts, legal exposure, customers and operations before completing a deal, to check that the seller's claims hold up?

Question 4

What is the name for an acquisition made mainly to bring the target company's staff, especially its engineers, onto the buyer's payroll, with the product and customers often wound down soon after the deal closes?

Question 5

What is the name for the rate at which a subscription business loses customers, or the revenue from them, over a period through cancellations and non-renewals?

Question 6

What is the name for the generous package of severance pay, bonuses and instantly vesting shares promised to a senior executive who loses their job as a result of the company being taken over?

Question 7

What is the name for the stage at which a startup has built something that a clearly defined group of customers genuinely wants, shown by strong organic demand, high retention and enthusiastic word of mouth?

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About Business Concepts & Jargon

This quiz, the last in the Money, Business and Economics set, is about the working vocabulary of running a company: the language of the accounts, of corporate structure and takeovers, of strategy consultants, of startups and venture capital, and of the marketing and human-resources and project-management jargon that fills the modern office. One hundred questions, each describing a term from a definition and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it.

The first pack is accounting and the financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement and the cash flow statement, assets and liabilities and equity, EBITDA, depreciation and amortisation, working capital, goodwill, accruals, the audit, the two big rulebooks, and the price-to-earnings and earnings-per-share measures. The second pack is corporate structure and dealmaking: limited liability, the board and the C-suite, holding companies and subsidiaries and joint ventures, mergers and hostile takeovers and the defences against them, due diligence, term sheets, leveraged and management buyouts, fiduciary duty, ESG and dual-class shares. The third pack is strategy frameworks and consulting jargon: the four-box analysis, the five forces, the value chain, the growth grids, the moat, first-mover advantage, core competencies, the scorecard, targets and objectives, disruptive innovation and the innovator's dilemma, the blue ocean and the long tail and the flywheel, and vertical integration and economies of scope. The fourth pack is startups and venture capital: bootstrapping, the pitch deck, the minimum viable product, product-market fit, the pivot, runway and burn rate, the cap table and pre-money valuation, the down round, angels and accelerators, unicorns, churn and customer economics, the rule of forty, the standard early-stage contract, the acquihire and the exit. The fifth pack is marketing and workplace jargon: the four Ps, the unique selling proposition, segmentation, the funnel, the loss leader, freemium and razor-and-blades pricing, planned obsolescence, the loyalty score, the Peter Principle and Parkinson's Law, micromanagement, the matrix organisation, quiet quitting, golden handcuffs, the improvement plan, agile working, the bullwhip effect, scope creep and synergy.

The wrong answers are always other terms of the same kind, so a firm grasp of the vocabulary is rewarded and a guess is quickly exposed. This quiz covers the language used inside a company; the broader ideas of economics are in the Economics Fundamentals quiz and the workings of stock markets are in Markets, Bubbles and Crashes. About a fifth of the questions carry a neutral photograph that fits any of the four options. Definitions have been checked against standard reference works.