Published method · for capital and for the companies it backs

We publish how we score, so you can argue with it.

A practice that sells judgment and will not show its working is selling assertion. These are the twenty-three dimensions we assess, what evidence satisfies each, how the scores reconcile, and what happens when they disagree. Two documents, the same method, written from opposite sides of the table.

Not gated

No form, no email, no download wall.

We do not ask for your address to read this. A method that only works by surprise is not a method, and a prepared company is a better company and a faster engagement.

Read it, use it, send it to someone. If it is useful, we would rather you had it than that we had your details.

For capital

The document a fund manager reads before the first call.

v1.3The Assessment Methodology

Four assessments — technical readiness, commercial compulsion, execution capacity and capital readiness — across twenty-three scored dimensions. The evidence grades that constrain a score. The reconciliation rules for when the assessments disagree, and why we refuse to produce a single composite number.

The risk register that follows is built to ISO 31000 and COSO ERM structure, so a finding enters your own reporting without translation. Seventeen numbered references. Section 15 states plainly what the method does not do.

Download the methodology — PDF, 35 pages

False-color aerial image of a coastline.

False-color infrared · U.S. Geological Survey · public domain

For founders, and for the people who backed them first

The same questions, read from the other side of the table.

v1.2The Assessment Guide for Founders

The same twenty-three dimensions, with what evidence satisfies each and what your answer reveals when you do not have it. Most fundraising advice teaches you to be persuasive. This is about being assessable — different skills, and after the first meeting only the second one matters.

Section 3 is written for the angel or seed investor already holding a position. It is the section most likely to be uncomfortable.

Download the founder guide — PDF, 24 pages

Who we work for

Stated here as plainly as it is stated everywhere else.

We are hired by capital, not by companies.

We publish the founder-facing version because the questions are better questions when everyone can see them, and because a company that has organized itself against them is a better company to underwrite. Nothing in it is advice to raise or not to raise, and nothing in it is written to make a company easier for us to sell to.

Where the method came from

A position taken in 1999, and what it cost.

In 1999 our founding principal took a substantial personal position in industrial-scale battery storage. The technology thesis was right — it is right today. He met the principals, saw a demonstration, read the plan and the projections, and had no instrument for assessing any of it.

The position failed. The larger cost was the reserve it drained and the positions that could not be taken for years afterward.

Each assessment in this method exists because of something that was not assessable that day.

The full account →

Argue with it

Both documents are reviewed at the end of 1Q2027.

Revision history is at the back of each document. If you think a threshold is wrong, they are built so you can say which one.

[email protected]

False-color aerial image of a mountain range in orange and blue.

False-color infrared · U.S. Geological Survey · public domain

We publish how we score, so you can argue with it.

v1.3The Assessment Methodology

v1.2The Assessment Guide for Founders

Tell us what you want to hear about.