What we see across the inbox — reconciliations, kill-flag taxonomies, and the patterns founders share without meaning to. Published when a pattern is robust enough to be useful at the IC table — not before.
Top-down market sizing is how decks justify ambition. Bottom-up is how investors check the math. The gap between the two is usually where the real conversation happens.
Most angel diligence calls run forty-five minutes and never get past traction. These three questions surface more than the other forty-five combined.
Every AI startup runs on someone else's inference. The question isn't whether — it's how exposed you are when prices triple, capacity gets rationed, or the platform launches a competing feature.
Burn isn't one number — it's three. The one in the deck is usually the prettiest. Here's how to triangulate the real one — and what it tells you about runway.
A taxonomy built from 1,142 dossiers. Eleven flags account for 78% of all material kills — and four are recoverable if the founder addresses them in the first call.
The questions that get past the rehearsed answers — and the silences that tell you more than the words. A field guide built from two hundred recorded calls.
A single design-partner customer can mask everything wrong with the GTM motion. Here's how we test for healthy vs. unhealthy concentration — and the three remediation paths IC tolerates.
Why founders show triangle charts instead of cohort tables — and the three reconstructions that turn a flattering retention slide into a defensible one.
The single most-claimed metric in the inbox — and the one most often mis-defined. A short field test for whether the number actually means what the deck implies.
The research above is portable. The dossiers automate it — specialist AI agents run the rebuilds, flag the patterns, and cite the sources, typically in under an hour per deck.