Counterparty Intelligence

01 / The gap

Capital diligence is mandatory. Human diligence barely exists.

Funds run KYC on the entity and call it diligence. Nobody checks the person behind the check — the operator's last two ventures, the co-founder dispute that never surfaced, the audience that turns out to be rented. Boards fill seats and conferences fill stages on reputation, and reputation is a story someone wrote. That's the gap. This practice sells the check nobody runs.

02 / What you get

An auditable record, not an opinion.

• The sweep

  A structured pass on the person — entities, roles, litigation trail, prior ventures, public conduct — mapped before any money or stage time moves. Delivered with an explicit register of what it couldn't determine, which is where the full tier begins.

• The report

  Not a PDF — a working vault. A self-contained, ontology-mapped knowledge base: every claim numbered to its source, every entity and relationship structured so it plugs directly into your own systems or drops into your comms or PR team's hands and runs. Hand it to a board, a GP, or a program committee without translating it first — or query it yourself with the AI you already use.

• The exposure audit

  Where your name, capital, or stage time sits next to theirs — and what a public fallout would actually cost you, priced before the announcement, the raise, or the run-of-show makes it permanent.

• The response

  The part no research firm touches: how to decline money without burning the relationship, pull a speaker days out, sequence a board conversation, and hold the position under pressure from someone with more money and better lawyers.

Research is the entry point. Response is the work.

03 / How it works

Every claim numbered. Every inference labeled.

Every finding enters a claims ledger with a number, a source, and a confidence label. Facts, inferences, and open questions are kept visibly separate — you always know which is which, and you can re-trace any claim back to where it came from. The ledger ships structured, so it moves intact into your systems, your counsel's, or your comms team's hands.

The hard lines are fixed: open sources only — public records, filings, archives, press, and on-chain activity. No subject contact, no pretexting, no covert methods. If it can't be documented from the outside, it goes in as an open question, never as a finding.

The practice is bootstrapped and independent. No commissions on outcomes, no referral fees, no stake in how your decision goes. Conflicts — past or present — are disclosed in writing before any engagement starts.

04 / The [embedded] operator

Trained to find it. Practiced at saying it.

A journalist's research habits, a communicator's delivery instincts, and a volunteer record tracking traffickers and laundering networks alongside working security researchers. Twenty-five years of strategic communications — including investor intelligence for founders heading into raises — capped by blowing the whistle on the criminals in my own ecosystem, at scale, and being both broke and unbroken by the experience.

A decade embedded in impact, crypto, foundations, and the conference economy. You learn how money with a history enters well-intentioned rooms by standing in those rooms, year after year.

Every claim I deliver is numbered to a source. That discipline starts with this page.

05 / Start here

One line about the situation.

Who's involved, what's on the table, and what you're trying to decide — a sentence is enough. You'll get a straight answer on whether a screen is worth running, usually within a day.