How We Evaluate Founders
The full assessment: what we measure, what the Soul-Map is and is not, and where it sits next to conventional diligence. Written out because a method you cannot describe is a preference.
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.
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.
Questions
- Do I have to give you my birth time?
- For the reading, yes: without an exact time it is simply not produced, so the application waits for the data. The conventional diligence runs either way and we will still read your application — there just will not be a founder report.
- Can the Soul-Map reject my company?
- No. It has no veto and never has. It changes which questions we ask and what we watch for after investing.
- Is this validated?
- Not in the statistical sense, and we will not claim otherwise. What exists is a written procedure, a stored record of every assessment, and the intention to publish what that record shows — including if it shows nothing.