Startup Analysis — Evaluating a Startup from the Perspectives of an Investor, Job Candidate, and Founder

Skill Overview

Startup Analysis is a startup analysis skill that first gathers publicly available information, then evaluates the same company from three perspectives: VC investor, job candidate, and CEO/founder. It concludes with a cross-perspective synthesis, helping you gain a 360-degree basis for judgment before making investment, career, or operating decisions.

Use Cases

1. Evaluating an investment opportunity: When considering investing in a startup, the skill conducts due diligence across dimensions such as market size, product and growth, unit economics, team, and competitive barriers. It produces clear investment theses (bull case) and key risks (bear case), and concludes with one of four ratings: “Strongly Avoid / Lean Avoid / Lean Invest / Strongly Favor.”
2. Evaluating a startup offer: When deciding whether to join a company, the skill focuses on financial stability and cash runway, the practical value of options and equity (including the effects of dilution and liquidation preferences), career growth opportunities, and signals about culture and workload. It also identifies red flags and concludes with one of four ratings: “Strongly Do Not Recommend / Lean Do Not Recommend / Lean Join / Strongly Recommend Joining.”
3. Company self-assessment for founders or advisors: If you run the company or advise it, the skill conducts a health check from angles such as product-market fit, growth efficiency (e.g., burn multiple and CAC payback period), competitive position, organizational health, and readiness for the next funding round. It highlights “strengths that should continue receiving investment” and “issues requiring urgent attention,” and provides an overall health rating.

By default, all three perspectives are included. You can also specify a focus—for example, “I’m considering joining them.” In that case, the skill will prioritize the job-candidate perspective while retaining the other two as background references, because risks identified from an investment perspective are often exactly the risks a job candidate needs to know about.

Core Features

1. Parallel analysis from three perspectives: The same company is evaluated separately from the positions of a VC investor, job candidate, and CEO/founder. Each perspective uses its own evaluation framework and decision criteria, avoiding blind spots caused by relying on a single viewpoint—a company can absolutely be a “good investment but a terrible employer,” and vice versa.
2. Structured due diligence report: The report follows a fixed structure and covers areas including market opportunity, product and growth, unit economics, team, moat, financial stability, equity value, organizational health, and strategic risks. Each perspective ends with a tiered conclusion and rationale, making cross-comparison and quick review easy.
3. Cross-perspective insights: The report concludes with a dedicated summary of areas of agreement and disagreement across the three perspectives. Strengths or problems identified by all three perspectives are generally the most credible. Disagreements—for example, a large market but a very short cash runway—are explicitly highlighted and distilled into a “bottom-line conclusion” covering what kind of company this is, its most likely trajectory, and what you should do given your specific circumstances.

Scope and limitations: The skill relies on publicly available information, such as the company website, funding information, news reports, and job postings. If public information is insufficient to support a meaningful analysis—for example, if it is impossible to determine what the company does, who its founders are, or how much funding it has raised—the skill will first ask you for links to the company website, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, or similar sources rather than fabricating a seemingly complete but potentially misleading report. For private companies, non-public data such as revenue will be clearly marked as an information gap. Limited inferences may be made using indirect signals, such as hiring pace, customer logos, and traffic proxy metrics, with the confidence level stated explicitly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What information do I need to provide to use this skill?

At minimum, you only need to provide a company name. The skill will first gather publicly available information. If you also have the company website, Crunchbase / LinkedIn / PitchBook links, funding announcements, job descriptions, or information you learned internally—for example, “They just raised a Series A from Sequoia”—providing it as well can significantly improve the quality of the analysis. You do not need to organize the information in advance; simply paste the links or provide a brief sentence of context.

Can early-stage companies with little public data still be analyzed?

Yes, but the conclusions will be less certain. For information-sparse early-stage companies, the skill will first ask you for the company website. The website is usually the densest source of information; its About, pricing, team, and blog pages can fill many of the gaps. The analysis will then clearly distinguish between “verified facts” and “signal-based inferences,” and label confidence levels rather than presenting inferences as conclusions.

Who are the three perspectives in the report intended for?

The VC investor perspective is suitable for people considering an investment, and can also help job candidates assess a company’s financing and runway safety margin. The job-candidate perspective is suitable for people who have an offer or are preparing for interviews. The CEO/founder perspective is suitable for operators and advisors. Even if you only care about one perspective, the other two are worth a quick look—they often reveal risks you would not have otherwise noticed.

Can the analysis be used directly as the basis for an investment or career decision?

It is an input to a decision, not the decision itself. The skill uses publicly available information to conduct structured reasoning, but it cannot access a due diligence data room, actual financial records, or internal interviews, and therefore cannot replace formal due diligence. It is best used as the first step in forming hypotheses and creating a list of questions to validate: the risks identified in the report are exactly what you should follow up on with the company, investors, or prospective colleagues.