Definitions: the terms this library runs on

Fifteen terms that recur across the library, each defined in one sentence and linked to the piece that develops it. Where a term is mine (the Revenue Foundation, the Three Measures, the Agent Mandate, the Seven C’s), the definition here is the canonical one.

• 01The Revenue Foundation — The five-stage method for taking a company from founder-led selling to a repeatable enterprise revenue engine: Insight and ICP, Value hypothesis and positioning, Discovery and qualification, Design partners and the first repeatable deals, and the Revenue operating system. Read the piece →
• 02Revenue-Market Fit — The point at which a company can win the same deal, from the same buyer, with the same playbook, without the founder — product-market fit proven in revenue rather than in usage. Read the piece →
• 03The Seven C's of Selling — A framework for reading the organizational, political, technical and commercial forces behind a complex enterprise deal, used to qualify, plan and review opportunities. Read the piece →
• 04Founder-led selling — The stage in which the founder is the only person who can close, because the ICP, the positioning and the process live in their head rather than in a system the company owns. Read the piece →
• 05The Agent Inventory — The single list of every AI agent operating in a company — eleven fields per agent, from owner and authority to spend and evidence feed — maintained as the system of record for what the agents are allowed to do. Read the piece →
• 06The Agent Mandate — A one-page delegation of authority to an AI agent: twelve fields covering purpose, scope, limits, escalation, evidence and a signature block, so authority is written down before the agent acts. Read the piece →
• 07The Three Measures — The AI ROI scorecard that survives the J-curve: Inputs (adoption and spend, weekly), Outcomes (cycle time, throughput, quality and Finance-verified value, monthly) and Organization (whether the work itself changed, quarterly), read together in four patterns. Read the piece →
• 08The AI J-curve — The dip before the rise in an enterprise AI program, when redesign, training and controls are expensed before the payoff is booked; measuring outcomes alone during the dip is how good programs get cancelled. Read the piece →
• 09Telemetry-verified vs. Finance-verified value — Two columns that never share a cell: what the systems show was saved or produced, and what the controller will sign as booked. The distance between them is the realization gap. Read the piece →
• 10Authority (in the agentic economy) — The property that lets an AI agent act on someone's behalf: who delegated it, what it covers, what its limits are and how it is proven — the scarce resource the agentic economy runs on. Read the piece →
• 11Verification bottleneck — The constraint that replaces compute as the limit on enterprise AI: the capacity to check what an agent did, at the data element, fast enough to act on it. Read the piece →
• 12Operational debt — The accumulated cost of processes that only work because a person compensates for them; AI does not fix it, it compounds it, because the agent inherits the process as written. Read the piece →
• 13Outcome-based pricing — Pricing AI by a measured result the buyer agrees to in advance rather than by seats or consumption — software sold seats, cloud sold consumption, AI will sell outcomes. Read the piece →
• 14Fractional CRO — A senior revenue executive who runs a company's commercial function part-time — typically two to three days a week for six to eighteen months — and is accountable for the outcome, as distinct from an interim CRO, an advisor or a consultant. Read the piece →
• 15Interim CRO — A revenue executive who holds the CRO seat for a defined term during a leadership gap or reset, usually nearer full-time, with the search for the permanent leader built into the plan. Read the piece →