The weekly operating layer · for people who size up companies before the round
See the whole ranked field every week — weeks before the round, or the press.
The free Sunday email gives you five names. Dashboard is the full ranked field beneath it — 60+ startups across 20 sectors, refreshed weekly, in plain English. You never read code: each name lands with a one-line reason it's moving — the kind you can drop in front of your team and sound early, not technical. Built for the moment a shortlist stops being enough.
Founding rate — locked for life while you stay. Cancel in one click. Read the methodology before you pay a cent.
The founding window is real, and it's dated
Founding rate closes in —
I'm not going to fake a five-minute timer at you. The honest version: lock in before June 30 and you keep €9.97/mo for as long as you stay — after that, new members pay €49/mo for the same data. That's about €470 a year you never pay, every year you stay. No seat counter, no fake reset — just one real, dated line: after June 30 the founding rate is gone for good.
Why I built this — The Data Nerd
The short version of how I stopped guessing.
I missed a company I'd seen six months early. Then I found out the proof had been public the whole time.
A startup I'd glanced at and passed on raised a round that made the rounds on Twitter. My first reaction was the usual one — how did I miss that? So I went back and pulled their public GitHub history. The answer was sitting right there: six months before the announcement, their engineering output had quietly doubled. New contributors. Tighter release cadence. A team accelerating in plain sight.
Nobody was reading it, because reading it meant parsing commit graphs across hundreds of repos every week. So I built the thing that does it for me. Every week it reads the public engineering activity of startups across 20 sectors, ranks who's accelerating, and writes it up in plain English — no code reading required.
Let me be straight about who's writing this: I'm an engineer, not a dealmaker. Fifteen years shipping code, the occasional small angel cheque on the side, never a fund — and honestly, I'm useless in a room. I'd rather read a commit history than work a conference. That's the whole reason this exists: I can't out-network anyone, so I learned to out-read the repos instead.
So here's the deal between us. You don't read code — that's my job, not yours. You read people, markets, and timing; I read the commit history so you never have to borrow an engineer's afternoon to know who's real. You make the call and look early in front of your team; I stay behind the regression. The free Sunday email is the headline — five names. Dashboard is the full field underneath it, the working surface I use myself. When your Sunday read keeps turning into ten open tabs and a promise to dig in later, you've outgrown the headline. This is the rest of it.
The only thing you have to believe
If a team's public engineering acceleration shows up weeks before the round — then the only edge that matters is reading it first.
That's the whole bet. Funding rounds and press are lagging indicators. Code is a leading one. Dashboard exists to put that leading indicator in front of you every week, before everyone else is looking. Knock down that one domino and the rest of this page is just logistics.
The three reasons people hesitate — and why each one doesn't hold
You've probably already thought one of these.
“I'll look non-technical in the room.”
It does the opposite. You never open a repo — every company lands with its sector, stage, and a plain-English line on why it's moving. I do the engineering read; you bring the name and the reason to the table. You don't sound less technical in front of your team. You sound early.
“Is code velocity even a real signal?”
Fair question — raw GitHub data is noise, the way raw market data is noise before a screener. We don't show commit counts; we flag the moment a team's engineering sharply breaks its own baseline. Across the panel behind this, that break led the funding announcement by 21 to 47 days. That's not noise — it's a regime change you can act on. It isn't infallible, either — and when it misfires, you'll see that too: every miss is graded in public, dated, next to the hits.
“Public data can't be an edge.”
Public isn't the same as read. The data is open; the work of reading every repo, every week, ranked and translated into plain English, is not. The edge was never secrecy — it's timing and attention. You get both, every week.
Everything you get every week
Here's exactly what lands in your hands.
Locked for life while you stay · cancel in one click · €49/mo for members who join after June 30
You don't have to take my word for any of it
The proof is public before the product asks for trust.
21–47 days
How early the engineering acceleration showed up before the funding round, across the panel behind this — 219 startups, five quarters, median 31 days. The full method is on SSRN; check it before you pay a cent.
60+ / 20
Sixty-plus startups ranked across twenty sectors, refreshed every single week from the live GitHub API. Not a one-time list — a standing field.
~4%
False-positive rate — measured and published, not buried. Every weekly pick is graded in public on the scorecard, Hit or Miss, at 60 and 90 days.
Want to see it work in your seat, not mine? Step-by-step walkthroughs by role — illustrative composites, not customer quotes — showing exactly how the field gets used:
Corp dev / M&A
Building an acquisition shortlist from acceleration — before a banker runs the process. Read the walkthrough →
PE operating partner
Benchmarking portfolio engineering against the field to brief the investment committee. Read the walkthrough →
Emerging manager / scout
Reaching the founder before the round, on a signal someone else translated into plain English. Read the walkthrough →
Why there are no testimonials on this page
I could write five glowing quotes and sign them with initials. I won't — you can't check those, and checking is the entire point. So instead of asking you to trust strangers, I hand you what you can verify yourself: the methodology on SSRN, the open dataset with a DOI, a full sample issue, and the live signal surface. When founding members go on the record, their words land right here — named, dated, real. Until then, the work is the proof.
The risk is on me, not you
€9.97 and a one-click exit. There's nothing to trap you here.
This is a month-to-month subscription, not a contract. No call to cancel, no dark-pattern hoops — one click in Stripe and you're done, keeping anything you've already downloaded. And there's a human behind it: reply to any issue and you'll get a written answer from me — in batches, never instant, but never a bot. Try the next issue. If the full field doesn't earn its ten minutes, reply within 30 days and I'll refund the month — no maze, no retention call. Stay, and your founding €9.97 never goes up.
This is for you if…
- You size up companies for a living — sourcing, screening, or diligence — and a five-name shortlist no longer covers it.
- You want the full ranked field across sectors, not just the weekly headline.
- You'd rather put the name on the table yourself than hear it from a competitor, the round, or the press.
- You value a tool that tells you the truth, including when not to buy it.
Honestly? Skip it for now if…
You're still evaluating the signal: start with the free Sunday email or First Look. Come back when missing the right company would actually bother you.
You want a smaller room around the signal: that's Insider, the next rung up.
You need thesis-specific custom work: go to Sector Sweep instead.
The questions I'd ask before paying.
Do I need to read code or understand engineering?
No — that's my job, not yours. Every company comes with a plain-English line on why it's accelerating, the kind you can repeat in front of your team. I do the engineering read; you make the call. You never open a repo.
What's actually different from the free Sunday email?
The free email is the top five. Dashboard is the full ranked field beneath it — 60+ startups across 20 sectors, sortable by sector, stage and geography, refreshed weekly. The headline vs. the whole story.
Is €9.97 really locked, or does it creep up later?
Locked for as long as you stay subscribed. Members who join after June 30 pay €49/mo for the same data. If you lock in now and never cancel, you never see €49.
€9.97 feels too cheap to be serious. What's the catch?
No catch — the price is a distribution choice, not a quality signal. A PitchBook seat runs upward of $20k a year and still won't flag engineering acceleration; this reads a leading indicator the terminals don't track, and I'd rather have a thousand readers who tell five friends than ten enterprise contracts. The methodology behind the €9.97 issue is the same one published on SSRN. The founding rate is locked for life precisely because the goal is reach, not margin.
How often is the signal wrong?
About 4% of flags are false positives — a monorepo migration or a hackathon spike that looks like acceleration but isn't. I'd rather tell you that than quote you “industry-leading accuracy.” Every weekly pick is graded in public on the scorecard, Hit or Miss, at 60 and 90 days. A vendor who never shows you a miss has no calibration discipline.
Can I cite this to my committee if the author is anonymous?
Yes — you cite the work, not the name. The methodology is a peer-reviewable paper on SSRN with a permanent ORCID, the dataset is open on Zenodo with a DOI, and every ranking reproduces from public GitHub data. Anonymity is deliberate — if the signal needed a charismatic founder to land, it wouldn't be strong enough — but the entity behind it is persistent and checkable, and you'll always get a written reply from the same person. Your IC can audit the formula without ever needing my name.
How do I cancel if it's not for me?
One click in the Stripe portal. No email, no call, no retention maze. You keep anything you've already downloaded.
Can I see the work before I pay?
Yes, and you should. The methodology is on SSRN, the sample issue is public, and the live signal surface is open to browse. Buy only after you've checked the work.
Start Dashboard
The full field, every week, for €9.97 — locked for life.
Picture next Monday. Someone in the room asks what's worth a look — and you put a name on the table nobody's mentioned yet, with a one-line reason it's moving, weeks before it lands in anyone else's inbox. You look early, not technical. That's the whole job of the field below.
60+ ranked startups across 20 sectors · plain-English signal · sortable to your thesis · methodology and dataset included · founding rate locked while you stay · cancel in one click.
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