Memos by John Zdanowski
- Joshua Pellicer
Joshua Pellicer is an entrepreneur whose recent work centers on applied artificial intelligence. He is one of the founders, with Chris Daigle and Peter Cobabe, of The World AI Summit, first held in...
- Glossary of Glossaries
The Glossary of Glossaries is the index of every glossary in John Zdanowski's library, from his own coined words to the finance, accounting, and venture vocabulary behind his CFO work. Glossaries...
- Accounting Glossary
The Accounting Glossary is a collection of the bookkeeping and accounting terms behind John's Weekly Accounting practice. It gives operators, founders, and bookkeepers a shared vocabulary for keeping...
- Contents of Consciousness
Contents of Consciousness is John Zdanowski's term for everything a person experiences, all that arises in consciousness and falls away, which his book maps as a two-by-two of Breath, Breeze,...
- the naught
the naught is John Zdanowski's name for consciousness itself: vast and unchanging, the ground that thoughts bubble up above, set against "the thinker" who believes they control their string of...
- General Semantics
General Semantics is a discipline founded by Polish-American scholar Alfred Korzybski that studies how language and other symbols shape human thinking and behavior, summed up in his dictum "the map...
- Payback Period
Payback Period is the time it takes for an investment to recover its initial cost from the cash it generates; in Unit Economics, it is the number of months a customer's gross profit takes to repay...
- Contribution Margin
Contribution Margin is revenue minus all variable costs, expressed per unit or as a percentage of revenue: the amount each sale contributes toward covering fixed costs and generating profit. In cost...
- Lifetime Gross Profit (LTGP)
Lifetime Gross Profit (LTGP) is the total gross profit a business expects to earn from a single customer over the relationship, calculated as lifetime revenue multiplied by realized gross margin, and...
- Lifetime Value (LTV)
Lifetime Value (LTV), also called customer lifetime value (CLV), is the total value a business expects to earn from a single customer over the entire relationship, usually expressed as revenue or...
- Churn Rate
Churn Rate is the percentage of customers, or of recurring revenue, lost during a period, calculated as the customers lost in the period divided by the customers at the start of it. Also called...
- Gross Margin
Gross Margin is revenue minus cost of goods sold (COGS), expressed as a percentage of revenue: the share of each sales dollar left after paying the direct costs of producing and delivering what was...
- Weekly Accounting Glossary
The Weekly Accounting Glossary is a collection of terms used in Weekly Accounting, John's practice of reading a business's numbers every week. It gives operators and bookkeepers a shared vocabulary...
- Credit and Lending Glossary
The Credit and Lending Glossary is a collection of the credit and lending terms from my work financing consumer brands and small businesses, including at Assembled Brands, for founders and investors...
- Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly Charts (WMQ)
Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly Charts (WMQ) are the charts in Our Framework that show each key business metric at three sampling frequencies (weekly, monthly, and quarterly), so a team can read this...
- Finance Glossary
The Finance Glossary is a collection of the finance, accounting, and business-metrics terms John Zdanowski uses in his CFO work, gathered so founders, operators, and investors can read his models,...
- My Glossary
My Glossary is a collection of the words and phrases John Zdanowski has coined to think with — from Philosofathergizer to Inevitable Unicorn to the Not-a-Book. Glossary 0-9 8-1-1 — the process of...
- Ledger Currency
Ledger currency is a unit of value whose balances exist as entries in a ledger kept by a single issuer or operator, as distinct from a blockchain currency, whose ledger is replicated across many...
- California AB5 Employee Test
California AB5 is a 2019 California law that codified the "ABC test" for deciding whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor, presuming employment unless the hiring entity proves...
- California AB 816
California AB 816, the California Worker Cooperative Act, is a 2015 California law (Chapter 192, Statutes of 2015) that renamed the state's consumer-cooperative statute the Cooperative Corporation...