This would of course add a layer of complexity to your visual language, but if you are aiming this at entrepreneurs and not just VC-backed or aspiring VC-backed entrepreneurs whose businesses lack tangible assets, then straight debt is an important financing option that shouldn't be overlooked.

Visuals can be hard to communicate in writing. That's why they're called visuals :-)

More concretely, I think any time you introduce a new language or symbology it requires a lot of explanation or practice before you can use it fluently. With something this simple you can probably provide the explanation in person w/ voice overs and direction interaction, it's going to be tough to do this in a single blog post. I bet you could do a great job of this in a book however!

Last weekend we had meetup of the Dutch Lean Startup Circle. We ended the meetup with a round circle to provide people with some quick feedback on their most pressing startup problems.

It resulted in a good discussion on all parts of startups. I think 2-3 entrepreneurs are now solving some problems in their startup because of that small round circle discussion.

That said, each time I've used this, it has been in conversation, not in writing alone, leading to greater understanding quite quickly in most cases. A lot of people didn't “get” what a convertible note was without the visuals, and two people who had actually signed convertible notes said they learned something specific about them from this.

This leaves me with a few hypotheses:
1) This won't work in writing alone, only to augment conversations.
2) The visual aspect of this confuses dominantly numerate people.

Of course, this could be do with a weakness in how I wrote this post as well, but at least  exposes some assumptions I've had here, and gives me a way to improve it. So thanks again for the feedback!