Do you speak start-up? An entrepreneurial vocab quiz.

“Once we pivot, we’re likely to have a good seed round with angels so we can finally disrupt the tech business. Let’s just hope we’re not ramen-profitable, haha!”

Did that sentence sound like gibberish to you? If you’re not in the start-up world, it likely would. Start-ups are filled with their own jargon, buzzwords, and colloquialisms popularized by an explosive tech scene and the esoteric communities it functions within. But with many start-ups making an appearance in our daily lives (Facebook, Snapchat, Air BnB) you may know more of the language than you think.

So here is the challenge: can you translate the start-up world to our own? Take this quiz to see if you speak the start-up slang.

3. Define: incubator

Wong Maye-E/AP
A Great Pied Hornbill chick, about 40 days old, is displayed at the Jurong Bird Park on Tuesday in Singapore. This is one of two chicks hatched successfully through artificial incubation and are notoriously difficult species to breed in captivity. Artificial incubation was necessary as the breeding pair of Great Pied Hornbills had cannibalized the chicks the previous year.

A warm environment where chicks are hatched from eggs; sometimes placed in start-up offices as a reminder of rebirth and new life.

A sauna that wealthy start-up alums often have placed in their Silicon Valley condos as a mark of success.

An organization, which can be associated with the government or an academic institution as well as a private company, that offers long-term research and development support for more complex start-up ideas.

A reality show where a cohort of start-ups live and work together in a house in San Francisco with the hopes of winning the prize $100,000 investment.

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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