Venture Capital Word of the Month: Resonate

I've been feeling nostalgic lately about the late 1990s. Adding ".com" to everything except the name tags on my underwear, putting my back out from lugging around copies of Business 2.0 and Red Herring to read on flights to San Jose (remember when they had 200 pages of ads?)...it was a magical, overinflated time.

I believe we need to re-coin 1990s lingo. If Justin Timberlake can bring sexy back (highly debatable) then surely we, as a community can bring back irrational markets in part by invoking irrational vocabulary.

Let's start with a favourite verb choice of one dot.com CEO: resonate. Why agree with something when you can "resonate" to it? "I resonate to that" is another way of saying that you concur, but in a start-up savvy way. (The CEO who used this term also coined my favourite phrase for replacing founders: "repositioning for success").

People who resonate own houses built high on the hill of an old orchard in the Silicon Valley, and drive cars with doors that open upwards. They climb mountains in exotic places for reasons that are unclear. They probably have lots of extra capital to deploy in these web 2.0 times. Let's make them feel at home.