What this desk needs
Market maps, TAM slides, and founder updates excel at story and metrics. They miss structural entropy in the vertical and inside the company — until multiples compress, follow-ons stall, or a cohort rewrites the thesis after the fact.
Where the Index fits
Effect: You time capital and intervention to structure — not the last board deck or the loudest narrative in the category.
Venture diligence reads the market map. Category stress builds underneath it.
Six-domain profile
Domains for Venture: Adaptation, Perceived, Courage, Identity, Mind.
- Adaptation — Category and company bandwidth to absorb shock — depleted bandwidth kills timelines before the metric board shows it.
- Perceived — Hype vs. structure — where crowded rounds and narrative premia diverge from the underlying system.
- Courage — Founder and leadership will to cut, reset, or hold sequence under pressure — not founder mythology.
- Identity — Trust and culture cohesion inside the portco — fractures before the retention cliff or the re-org.
- Mind — Signal clarity through the org — decision quality under growth and AI load.
What you leave with
- Vertical: A score on the industry you underwrite — Desk-licensed phase reads on sectors and geos in your thesis — category timing with an audit trail, not another market map.
- Portco: A Company Index on the company — Score, six domains, TVG, and a sequenced 90-day plan — dated, defensible in partner and LP rooms.
- Lead: Lead time before the write-down — Structural stress months ahead of the metric cliff — time to intervene, reserve, or re-underwrite the thesis.
How desks use it
- Vertical and thesis watchlists — Score the industries and corridors your funds underwrite — alerts when the category crosses a phase boundary, not when TechCrunch notices.
- Pre-term-sheet organizational screen — Fast structural read on a target company before deep diligence spend — same instrument as nations and markets.
- Portco under load — Full Company Index when a company is restructuring, AI-loading, or missing plan — score first, then sequence intervention.
Evidence anchor
### What locks Portfolio and category compression replays show Perceived Insecurity elevated while Adaptation and Courage sit depleted — the arc that precedes write-downs and crowded-category resets by months, while dashboards still report through.
What we will not claim
- This is structural classification — not a dated forecast, not an allocation signal, not a return claim.
- Scoring is deterministic under sealed physics. AI structures evidence into that formula and can read the face. It does not write the number.
Data in. Score out — no AI in the number.
Common questions
How is this different from PE? Same instrument. Different job. PE leans hold-period ops and covenant risk. Venture leans category timing and earlier-stage portco stress — thesis verticals on the desk, Company Index when a company is under load.
Do you score startups from public data only? Company Index engagements are public-data scoped by default. You can provide internal materials; we don't scrape private metrics as a product claim. Vertical and industry scores use the same sealed Index stack as other desks.
Is this a market-map or TAM tool? No. We classify structural stress and phase conditions in systems — industries, geos, organizations — not addressable-market sizing or competitor feature grids.
Full desk playbook
Venture Portfolio Risk Intelligence playbook · White paper · Case studies.