By: Jack Ryan
It’s funny how easy it is to lose track of how I speak.
I have spent years immersed in the jargon of modern business. Phrases like circle back, table this, **and move the needle have infiltrated my sentences, while redundant phrases like use case (meaning: use) or value add (meaning: value) pepper my paragraphs. I’m proud to say that some idioms, like Open the Kimono, enrage me and have failed to find a place in my lexicon. Many more have snaked their way into my speech, though.
These phrases (and you can surely think of a thousand more) have become the basis of a tech-influenced corporate vocabulary, what I might term technocorporatese (TC). It is a parlance that I have become fluent in. Besides the more obvious technocorporatese slang I’ve listed off above, there’s the sneaky words that, at first, appear innocuous. I’ve been saying things like customer, growth, and product for years without ever questioning their meaning. These words are descriptive of the things they denote, and they are surely not technocorporatese… Right?
On a visit to Chartway Credit Union a few weeks ago, I had occasion to take an inventory of how my own language has been influenced by technocorporatese, and to observe how this industry-specific lingo may present hidden obstacles for startups trying to communicate with their markets. My conclusion, to warp a non-corporate idiom: When in Rome, speak as the Romans speak.
I’ve been working in the startup space for six years. Startup years convert to enterprise years much like dog years to people years, which is to say, six years with one startup is a very long time. In that time, I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to the way founders talk, enough that certain words and phrases (the ones I’ve italicized throughout this article) have become so familiar to me that I assume their meaning is implicit.
I distinctly remember my first week at FinGoal, in part because it coincided with Boulder Startup Week. This was a rapid linguistic education for me in technocorporatese. To a newcomer, this language glitters like gold. A linguistic history might be in order. I suspect that technocorporatese has its roots in American venture capital jargon. From there, it worked its way into boardrooms across the nation, and then intermixed with glitzy, new-wave Silicon Valley techno-speak to create the medusa that is modern technocorporatese.
As with any language, TC retains characteristics from its usage over time. From the venture capitalists, it is focused on big risks and bigger rewards (see: Unicorn, growth-mindset, growth-hacking). The boardrooms gave it a distinctly business-focused flavor (see: 30,000 foot view must have been coined by business frequent-fliers; deliverables; white-boarding; go-to-market). Technology stepped in last to inject some flavor (see: Iterate, ideate, thought-leader), tinged with the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley culture.
I’ve been immersed in this language for six years, and I rarely hear insiders question the language, if ever. I have rarely questioned it myself. These idioms are used so prolifically that they border on becoming a cant. Indeed, their main use seems to be to accelerate conversations between insiders in the corporate/tech space. It makes communicating with other tech-industry folks on the B2B side (Author’s Note: this one was organic and I almost didn’t catch it) simpler; this is a reason why cants develop, after all.
And yet, for how readily it comes to me, I feel like I’ve forgotten something…
…Being that cants are also designed to box outsiders out. The most notable cants in history allow insiders to freely exchange information while preventing outsiders (who speak the same underlying language) from understanding it. Consequently, when I use the cant with a customer who isn’t really in the corporate tech industry (like a credit union), I might be boxing them out. Allow me to provide an example.
A lot of words are synonyms to me, and I use them interchangeably. Business/Company. Vendor/Partner. In particular (for purposes of this article): Customer/User.
In most conversations I have, the conflation of customer/user is pretty safe, even if it’s not always technically true. I talk to many engineers who refer to their end users as customers, and vice versa*.* From a strictly technical perspective, the difference is immaterial. In many cases, the end users actually are customers.
I’m happy to employ whichever term comes to mind first. But during the visit to Chartway Credit Union in Norfolk, Virginia, I was made to understand that this is not always a good idea.
I might preface this section with a terrible confession: Prior to the visit, I really didn’t understand how credit unions are different from other FIs. As I’ve worked in Fintech for six years, it felt too late to ask. As a technician, their integrations with our APIs were not different from those that a bank or another tech company might build, so I didn’t need to know the difference.
For those of you who might be in a similar position, here’s the difference. Credit unions, unlike startups (or banks), do not have customers. The people who bank at credit unions are their members. They are absolutely not customers. This might seem like a bit of pedantry, but CUs like Chartway take it very seriously. They do not sell to their members, they serve their members. The members own the CU, and therefore, the CU works for them.
This is radically different from how startups talk about our users. Even those of us who provide a good service to our end users still know those users as customers. We sell them products. At the end of the day, even the most service-focused startup doesn’t survive strictly on how much that service helps its users. That is, no doubt, a contributing factor to a startup’s success, but cold practicality mandates that a startup generates revenue*.* How much product a startup can sell, and how much revenue they can generate from those sales, is what makes a startup succeed — at least, from an economic perspective.
So, yes; Credit unions and startups are very different organizations. This means we have different organizing principles, different goals, and consequently, we employ different language.
When I say customer instead of member with regards to a credit union member, I am exposing the fundamental difference between our organizations, laying it bare like an open wound. I don’t mean to do it; it’s a slip of the tongue, a false equivalence, an accident. What it does, though, is it highlights that my priorities as a technologist are different from a credit union’s priorities. Their member bankrolls them; I, meanwhile, am looking for to create value with technology in exchange for a profit above my costs.
I say this as a cautionary tale. Obviously, most startup founders are not shameless profiteers. They really want to help users with their products and services. And yet, sometimes our language can paint another picture. Just like the Inuit came up with some huge lexicon of words to describe polar terrain, corporations have carved out an equally vast dictionary of idioms to describe turning a profit. When we speak this way to prospects who work at not-for-profits, however, we might accidentally make it seem like our values do not correspond to theirs.
Particularly right now, language choice is important. The major technologists of Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, especially Elon Musk, have done our industry a disservice through their greed. The tech world’s titans have demonstrated that they consider their users little more than streams of potential revenue. We are their customers to the maximum definition of the word. This problem is especially sharp in finance technology, where a flotilla of cryptomongers (this is one of my own, I think we should have more x-mongers in modern life) have pitched products ranging from the fecklessly stupid (see: DOGE coin) to the outwardly fraudulent (see: Sam Bankman-Fried)
Many startups aren’t anything like these big corporations. Through our language, we might distance ourselves from them. When I visit a credit union, I should never self-identify as a vendor selling a product to your customers, but as a partner offering a service to your members. It’s time that I think more thoroughly about how I talk, and where it positions me.
What if there’s a disconnect between what we mean in technocorporatese, and how its interpreted by our partners? It took our visit for Chartway for me to fully recognize that credit unions take their mission seriously. They are not-for-profit, member-owned organizations that are profoundly different from venture-backed startups. I even wonder if they have their own library of idioms that I’ve never heard—I bet they do.
I think we could learn a lot from how credit unions talk. Throughout the visit, I heard a lot of considered and well-voiced opinions, concerns, and ideas. I heard them from people who care deeply about their members, and about serving those members well. What I liked about this mode of speaking was that the focus was entirely on how well the credit union’s technology served its members, and on how much they could help those members by partnering with fintechs.
Absent from those conversations was any talk about ROI or 10Xing or growth hacking (Please, LinkedIn, please stop). The CU’s primary focus was on serving their members, and never ever once on exploiting them for the CU’s profit. In a world where technology is increasingly coupled with corporate revenue goals, we would to well to remember (as the credit unions clearly do) that technology should be for the service of humanity first.
.png)
