We've spent more than a few posts ragging on entrepreneurs who use phrases like "synergistic roll out of the strategic planning phases" in their business plan. But our last post covering some of the start-ups that secured funding this week got us thinking that maybe we missed the point. Here's how one of those businesses describes themselves on their website:

"Verification today is a central component of modern electronic design methodologies, and arguably the single most risky and intensive part of the entire process. Yet, drawing the conclusion that enough verification has been performed on a design still requires an unscientific, gut instinct call on behalf of project managers, leaving the potential for bugs to exist deep within the code structure, only to be discovered after chip fabrication."

What?

As confusing as that paragraph is, we had a realization (after recovering from reading it). We'd pegged the problem with paragraphs like that wrong. It's not just that entrepreneurs rely on jargon because they think it makes them sound smarter —oftentimes the issue is that they over-complicate the description of their service or product. That's a mistake, and it's a problem that's particularly pervasive in business plans. While we realize that the start-up in question is obviously incredibly technical, that doesn't mean that there isn't a better, clearer way to describe it.

Now, before you start yelling that your business is different, and that it actually warrants a three paragraph description, consider this: even Google, which functions using a highly-complex algorithm, can be described in a sentence or two. No matter how technical your business, you should be able to do that as well.