Learn
If you are new to early-stage investing, the vocabulary can feel like a wall: deal flow, pre-seed, SAFEs, valuation caps, signal versus noise. The guides below explain the fundamentals in plain language, and show where engineering momentum data fits into a modern evaluation process.
Every guide on this page builds on the same observation that powers GitDealFlow: public GitHub activity is a leading indicator. Before a startup raises, before it hires a banker, before the round hits the press, its engineering team usually starts moving faster. GitDealFlow reads the public GitHub activity of 350+ startups and tracks commit velocity, contributor growth, and repository expansion to spot that acceleration early.
Fundamentals
What Is Deal Flow in Venture Capital?
Deal flow is the stream of investment opportunities a fund or investor evaluates, and its quality determines portfolio quality. How VCs source, evaluate, and track opportunities, and where engineering momentum fits in a modern sourcing workflow.
What Is Pre-Seed Investing?
The stage before the first institutional round, when startups have the least data and the most risk. Definitions, deal structures, and evaluating opportunities when revenue is thin or nonexistent.
How to Build an Investment Thesis
A thesis is a falsifiable claim about where returns will come from. How to write one, test it against data, and let it discipline your sourcing instead of rationalizing your deals.
How to Structure a Syndicate Deal
Carry, SPVs, and deal-by-deal economics for angels who want to write bigger checks together without starting a fund.
What Is a Deal Flow Signal?
What separates a tradeable leading indicator from lagging coverage, and the anatomy of the three GitHub signals GitDealFlow tracks.
The Three Signals
What Is Commit Velocity?
The engineering metric investors overlook: what it measures, how to read its trend, and why it rises 3 to 6 weeks before a fundraise. Includes the formula and its limitations.
What Is Engineering Velocity?
The broader signal built from commit velocity, contributor growth, and repository expansion, and why it leads funding news by weeks.
What Is Contributor Growth?
Why a growing team of active committers is conviction made visible, and the red flags: bus-factor-one teams, contractor churn, and vanity open source.
GitHub Signals for VC Due Diligence
How to use public GitHub evidence to verify execution, team scaling, and product direction during diligence, and what the three signals can and cannot prove.
Engineering Benchmarks by Funding Stage
What engineering maturity looks like from pre-seed to Series B, and why stage and sector context beat any universal benchmark number.
Diligence and Deal Craft
How to Evaluate a Pitch Deck
The 10-point framework VCs use: problem, insight, traction, market, team, and the slides that predict follow-on meetings.
How to Read a Cap Table
Preference stacks, option pools, and dilution mechanics, decoded line by line for investors who want to know what they actually own.
How to Calculate Startup Valuation
Five methods for pricing an early-stage company, from comparables to scorecards to the Berkus method, and when each breaks down.
How to Do Reference Calls Like a VC
The questions that surface real signal, the references founders never offer, and how to read what is not said.
How to Find Startups Before They Raise
The sourcing playbook: where to look before announcements, how to verify momentum, and how to reach out while the round is still being assembled.
How to Track Startup Engineering Momentum
A working weekly routine for monitoring acceleration across a target list, with the exact metrics to log.
Venture Scouting: Best Practices
The four practices that separate productive scouts from busy ones: leading indicators, a repeatable routine, written receipts, and optimizing for access and speed.
What You Will Learn
- How deal flow works and why sourcing is the most important job in venture.
- How pre-seed deals are structured and what to look for when data is scarce.
- How non-financial signals reveal traction that revenue reports cannot.
- How to verify an engineering momentum signal on GitHub yourself, in minutes.
Learn by Doing
The fastest way to learn is to watch real signals. GitDealFlow's method is published on SSRN under a CC BY 4.0 license with an open dataset, and it was validated on a research panel of 219 startup-period observations across 55 startups, with signals typically appearing 21-47 days before the round hits the press.
Subscribe to the free weekly digest and you will receive five names every Sunday by email, selected for accelerating engineering activity. It is free, unsubscribes in one click, and works as a live case study: each week, pick one name, open its GitHub organization, and compare what you see with what the signal described. Paid tiers (Dashboard and Insider) add deeper tracking once you are ready.
Explore by Topic
One-line definitions live in the glossary. Quick answers to common questions are grouped at /faq. Step-by-step playbooks are at /how-to, and ready-to-use diligence artifacts at /checklists. Tool comparisons: /best and /vs. Role-specific workflows: /for and the Fund Scout Program and /use-cases. Quick answers to common questions at /answers, and tool integrations (Slack, Notion, Airtable, Sheets, Affinity) at /integrations. Free calculators at /tools, raw data at /data, and the method behind it all at /research.