Glossary: the terms for building new businesses
The terms FounderFold uses, defined in one or two sentences each.
- Venture studio
- A venture studio is an organization that creates companies repeatedly with a shared team and method: it sources ideas, validates them, builds the survivors and stops the rest.
- Agentic OS for building new businesses
- An agentic OS for building new businesses is software in which agentic AI (AI agents that plan and carry out multi-step work) does the repeatable work of creating businesses — research, scoring, tracking and reporting — on one shared method, while people make the decisions. FounderFold is the agentic OS for building new businesses, with stage gates, kill criteria and reports leadership reads.
- Agentic AI
- Agentic AI is AI that plans and carries out multi-step work toward a goal, using tools and checking its own results, instead of answering a single prompt. An agentic OS for building new businesses applies it to research, scoring, tracking and reporting, with people making the decisions.
- Corporate venture building
- Corporate venture building is the creation of new businesses by an established company, using its assets — customers, brand, licenses, channels — and managing them in stages with gates, apart from the core business.
- Innovation portfolio management
- Innovation portfolio management is steering a set of new businesses as a whole: balancing stages and risk, deciding at each gate which projects continue or stop, and reporting the portfolio’s value to leadership.
- Portfolio
- A set of ideas and projects that share one configuration: profile, goals, discard criteria, scoring rubric, sources and spending limits.
- Discard criteria
- Knock-out questions an idea must pass before it is scored. One failure is enough to discard it, and the failed criterion is recorded.
- Scoring rubric
- The weighted criteria used to score an idea on a 0–10 scale, each score backed by evidence.
- Evidence
- The source behind a claim: a URL or document plus the date it was consulted. A claim without evidence is marked NOT VERIFIED.
- On hold
- An idea paused with a written condition and a review date, rather than accepted or discarded.
- Stage-gate
- A way of managing new projects in stages separated by gates, where people decide to go, stop, hold or redirect based on evidence against agreed criteria. In FounderFold, agents propose the stages and gates for each project, and your team adjusts them.
- Project lifecycle
- The stages, milestones, gates and kill criteria a project goes through. In FounderFold, agents propose it from the type of project, business and organization, and each portfolio and project can adjust it.
- Gate
- The exit condition of a stage, made of measurable milestones such as paying customers or monthly revenue.
- Gate debt
- A gate from an earlier stage that a project skipped. It stays visible until the milestones are met.
- Kill criteria
- Kill criteria are conditions, written before a stage starts and with a deadline, under which a project should stop. When one is triggered, a person decides: close the project, pause it with a retrospective, or record why it does not apply.
- Experiment
- A test of one assumption with a numeric success criterion and a deadline, agreed before it starts.
- Retrospective
- A periodic review of a project: what went well, badly or so-so, and what to change.
- Lesson
- A finding from experiments or retrospectives that changes the portfolio’s configuration, with the change and its reason logged.
- Task
- A unit of work with an objective, instructions, an executor — an agent or a person — a scope and a deadline. Its result comes back structured for a person to apply.
- Weighted pipeline value
- The sum, over ideas and projects, of possible year-three revenue multiplied by the probability of reaching first revenue from their current stage, shown with a low–high range.
- Credits
- Prepaid units that FounderFold’s agents consume. They are reserved before a task starts and the agent stops when the reservation runs out.