Say What You Mean

Nobody taught us to talk this way. Somewhere along the line, we just started doing it and nobody said anything, and now here we are.

You’ve been in the room. The pitch deck clicks to slide four and someone starts talking about their “moat.” And the room nods. And the deck moves on. And not a single person stopped to ask what they actually meant, because we’ve all quietly agreed that “moat” means something sophisticated, something defensible, something worth funding, and asking for a plain-English translation would make you look like you didn’t get it.

That’s the trap. And we all walked into it willingly.

Let me just say this out loud: a moat is a thing around a castle. It’s filled with water. Sometimes, historically, it had alligators in it. You know what it does not have in it? Software. Or a go-to-market strategy. Or a proprietary dataset that three other companies are also building.

When a founder says they have a moat, they almost always mean one of about five things. They solved a hard problem. They got there first. Their customers would have a real headache switching. They own data nobody else has. Or their network effects make the product better as more people use it. Those are real things. Real, explainable, defensible things that I would love to hear a founder talk about with actual words.

But “moat” is easier. It signals fluency. It says “I’ve read the Buffett letters, I’ve listened to the podcasts, I know the vocabulary.” And in a room full of people who also know the vocabulary, it moves fast and nobody slows it down.

That’s the problem with jargon in general. It’s not that the words are wrong. It’s that they replace thinking with shorthand, and over time the shorthand starts to substitute for the actual idea. You stop explaining and start signalling. You stop communicating and start performing.

And the tech and VC world is better at this than almost anyone.

“Disruption.” “Ecosystem.” “Flywheel.” “Land and expand.” “Frictionless.” “Value proposition.” “Defensibility.” Every single one of these words has a real meaning underneath it, a real thing they were trying to describe when someone first used them. And every single one of them has been used so many times, in so many pitch decks and earnings calls and LinkedIn posts, that the meaning got wrung out of them somewhere around 2017 and we just kept using the husk.

I’m not just picking on founders here. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We all code-switch into the dialect when we’re in the room because it’s faster, because it signals belonging, and because honestly it feels a little bit like armour. If I use the right words, maybe nobody asks me to slow down and explain myself.

But here’s the thing. The best conversations I’ve ever had in business, the ones where something actually got decided or built or fixed, have almost never sounded like a pitch deck. They sound like two people who know what they’re talking about just saying the thing.

“We’re the only company that does X this way, and here’s why that matters to the customer.” That’s a moat. That’s the whole moat. You didn’t need the word at all.

There’s a version of this that’s just laziness, and I think most of it is. When you reach for the jargon, you’re usually reaching because you don’t quite have the plain version ready, or because you’re in a hurry, or because the room already speaks the language and re-translating feels like extra work. I get it. But lazy language tends to produce lazy thinking, and lazy thinking in business tends to produce, you know, outcomes we’ve all seen before.

The other version is more deliberate and, honestly, a little more insidious. Some people use jargon specifically to obscure. To make something sound more complex than it is, or to make a gap in the logic harder to notice, or to create the impression that there’s more substance in the slide than there actually is. If you ever catch yourself using a big word to hide a small idea, that’s worth sitting with for a second.

None of this means precision isn’t valuable. Specific language, technical language, language that carries meaning efficiently between people who share context, that’s great. That’s not jargon, that’s craft. The difference is whether the word is doing real work or just wearing a costume.

You want to tell me about your competitive advantage? Tell me what you actually do that nobody else does, or what you do better, or what you’ve built that would take a competitor three years to replicate. Tell me the thing. Use the words that describe the thing. Let me feel the edges of it.

That’s a better pitch than a moat.

And honestly, it’s a better conversation.