How We Evaluate Founders

Conventional diligence comes first

Market size and shape, the wedge, early unit economics, cap table hygiene, and references — including references the founder did not choose for us. None of this is unusual and none of it is optional.

Most decisions are made here. The second instrument changes the questions, not the arithmetic.

The Soul-Map, plainly

The Soul-Map is a structured reading of a founder’s birth data — date, exact time, place — using classical Jyotish, run as a written procedure with a fixed set of outputs. It produces three things: a description of how this person tends to decide, the shape of their working relationships, and periods where their own record suggests they carry risk better or worse.

It is produced before the founder meeting and stored unchanged. That is the point of writing it down: an impression formed in a meeting is very good at rewriting whatever came before it.

Where the procedure comes from

The reading follows the school of K. N. Rao. He spent thirty-three years at the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and retired from a senior post; the school he founded has trained more than a thousand astrologers since 1987. We name this not for authority but so it is visible that the procedure has a written source and a lineage, rather than the private intuition of whoever is assessing you.

Since 2001 Jyotish has been taught at state universities in India, up to bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. That is a fact about a teaching institution, not an argument about the nature of the method: what the Soul-Map does not claim about itself is the next section, and nothing here overrides it.

There is a market alongside it: Astrotalk in India reported roughly $140M of revenue in FY2025, and Co-Star in the US raised $21M from Founders Fund and Spark Capital. We do something different — founder assessment for an investment decision, not a consumer service — but this has not been a hobbyists’ field for a long time.

What it does not claim

It does not predict whether a company will succeed. It does not produce a score that ranks one founder above another. It is not validated against outcomes in any sense a statistician would accept, and we do not present it as though it were.

What it does is make our reasoning legible. When we pass on a company, we can say which question we could not get past — and the founder gets that answer in writing.

The decision log

Every assessment ends in a short written record: what we believed, what would have changed our mind, and what we decided. It is kept whether we invest or not.

Over enough decisions this is the only honest way to find out whether the method is worth anything. We would rather build the record now than claim the conclusion early.