It's one of those buzzwordy terms currently in vogue in the tech industry. It's a hipper way of saying "not creative/disruptive". The b-school equivalent would be "thinking inside the box". For example, here's sama (president of YC)[0]:

> Very rare and extremely powerful combination: the ability to think both clearly and very non-linearly. Most people lucky to have one.

An example of nonlinear thinking by sama[1]:

> the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract.

As you might expect, Peter Thiel prefers to be a contrarian and use his own term for it: Zero to One[2].

0. https://www.twitter.com/sama/status/699330028404772864

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048944

2. https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/080...

theskimm, buzzfeed

pinterest, etsy, fab, digitalocean, buzzfeed, any media platform, guilt, foursquare, seamless web, app nexsus, etc. I could literally list 100.

So there are actually other things being built in NYC that are very not scenish at all.

Like Vroom - no one talks about the used car market, but they are huge. Knewton and Schoology, two other big company no one treats as huge unless you are into ed-tech Kinnek just raised a huge round, they are trying to be an amazon of suppliers

All of these things are impactful, but, well, weird. There are a LOT of those types of things in NYC

Just look at the general investment philosophy of any VC below T1.