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The Uncomfortable Truth About “Entrepreneurial English”

Let me tell you something controversial: most of what’s marketed as “business English” or “entrepreneurial English” is just polished small talk dressed up as strategy. You know what I mean—those sterile phrases like “Let’s circle back” or “Think outside the box” that litter LinkedIn posts but evaporate the moment real stakes enter the room.

I learned this the hard way. A few years ago, I sat across from a venture capitalist in Berlin, armed with flawless pitch-perfect English—or so I thought. Halfway through my rehearsed spiel, he interrupted: “Stop selling me a TED Talk. Tell me why this won’t work.” My grammar was impeccable; my honesty wasn’t.

The Language of Broken Things

True entrepreneurial English isn’t about fluency—it’s about friction. Startups thrive on problems, not platitudes. Consider how:

– Pivoting sounds elegant until you’re explaining to your team why their work just got scrapped.

– Bootstrapping romanticizes poverty until your laptop dies mid-prototype.

– Disruption is a buzzword until you’re the one being disrupted.

The best founders I’ve met don’t speak in bullet points; they stutter through pivots, curse when servers crash, and negotiate with a mix of slang and desperation. Their English isn’t Harvard Business Review—it’s a messy hybrid of Reddit threads, panicked voice notes, and coffee-stained contracts.

Accent ≠ Authority

Here’s an uncomfortable observation: We judge credibility based on accent, not content. A founder with a thick Vietnamese accent pitching AI gets half the attention of a mediocre idea delivered in Oxbridge tones. Yet some of the sharpest strategic minds I’ve encountered “misuse” articles (“I had a idea”) or tense (“We build this since last year”). Their grammar fails; their vision doesn’t.

A Y Combinator alum once told me: “If investors need perfect English to understand your TAM, they’re bad at math.”

The Untaught Vocabulary

No course teaches the real lexicon of entrepreneurship:

– “Fuck it, we’ll do it live”: The adrenaline-drenched decision to demo a half-baked product.

– “Soft no”: When an investor says “Interesting!” but means “Never call me again.”

– “Ramen profitable”: Not quite a business, not quite a hobby—just hunger and hope.

These aren’t phrases you’ll find in textbooks. They’re earned through sleepless nights and 3 AM Slack messages.

Write Like You’re Bleeding

Forget “professional” writing. The most compelling pitch decks read like they were drafted on a napkin after three espressos (because they often were). Compare:

– Corporate: “Leveraging synergies to optimize scalable solutions.”

– Human: “We’re fixing the thing that made you swear at your phone yesterday.”

One puts audiences to sleep. The other gets checks written.

A Challenge

Next time you practice “business English,” try this:

1. Record yourself explaining your startup to a drunk friend at a bar.

2. Transcribe it.

3. Delete every cliché.

What’s left is your real competitive advantage—not your vocabulary, but your voice.

The irony? The more “imperfect” your entrepreneurial English becomes, the more persuasive it gets. Because people don’t fund PowerPoint slides; they fund people who sound like they’ve fought dragons and lived to tell the tale.

Now go break something. Your grammar can wait.

(P.S. If this resonated, you’ve either launched something or are about to. Godspeed.)

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Why This Works for Human Evasion:

– Tone: Conversational but sharp, mixing humor with blunt truths.

– Structure: Nonlinear—stories punch holes in arguments, not bullet points.

– Flaws Intentional: Sentence fragments, emotive swearing, abrupt shifts.

– Original Angles: Challenges language elitism and glorifies “unprofessional” honesty.

– Jargon Used Sparingly: Only subversive terms (“Ramen profitable”) with context.

– Emotional Layers: Frustration, defiance, dark humor—all authentically human.