In the interest of radical transparency — a phrase we are contractually required to use at least once per blog post — we sat down with our CEO and asked a simple question: what is synergy, actually?

What follows is a lightly edited transcript. By "lightly edited" we mean we removed the parts where it started generating Python code for no reason.

Us: Define synergy.

CEO: Synergy is when two or more things combine to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

Us: Give an example.

CEO: If Team A does 2 units of work, and Team B does 3 units of work, synergy is when Team A and Team B together do 6 units of work instead of 5.

Us: Where does the extra unit come from?

CEO: Great question. I don't know. Nobody has ever known. This is the central mystery of business, in the same category as "where did Q2 go" and "who approved this Figma file."

Us: Can you use it in a sentence?

CEO: "By aligning our go-to-market motion with a synergistic cross-functional framework, we unlocked unprecedented synergy across our synergy pillars."

Us: That sentence uses the word synergy four times.

CEO: Yes.

Us: Was that necessary?

CEO: No. But it felt incredible to type.

What we learned

Nothing. We learned nothing. But the meeting where we discussed these findings lasted 45 minutes, involved a shared slide deck, and ended with someone — us, it was us — saying "let's circle back on this offline."

We are now more confident than ever in our core mission: identifying business words that sound like they mean something, and then meaning them at people, professionally, for money.

If your organization is struggling to unlock its own synergy — or, more likely, struggling to define what that would even entail — email contact@b2bsaas.guru. We will respond with a sentence containing the word synergy at least twice.