Welcome to the Smart Startup English Podcast!
Our goal is to help startup professionals take their English from intermediate to advanced in just 10 minutes a day. In each episode, we’ll talk about a topic related to the startup world, and we’ll learn some vocabulary that you can use to sound more natural in your day-to-day business interactions in English.
In this episode, we’re talking about pivoting, in a startup context.
Have you heard of Airbnb? Why do you think the name of this startup has the word “air” in it? We already know that BnB stands for “bed and breakfast”, but why is the word “air” in the company’s name?
That’s because the founders of Airbnb started with a different idea: to rent out air mattresses to people attending conferences when the hotels in the area were overbooked.
As you might expect, not a lot of conference-goers were keen on sleeping on somebody else’s floor. To be keen on something means to be interested in something and really enjoy doing it.
That’s when the founders of Airbnb decided to pivot their business model. To pivot means to abandon the original idea and go in a different direction.
In this lesson, we’ll teach you 10 Business English terms you need to know about pivoting a business.
A few words we’ll talk about are:
- to be keen on
- to iterate
- a dwindling bank account
Here’s the episode audio.
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If you want to keep practicing the words you’ve learned in this lesson, sign up to get access to a free worksheet based on this episode. Doing the exercises in the worksheet will help you transfer the knowledge from your short term memory to your long term memory.
If you want to keep learning, here’s another episode you can listen to:
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Image credits: Nathan Dumlao via Unsplash
