For investors · 114 items
You are underwriting a person, not a deck.
Financial diligence is a solved problem. The founder is not. The Entrepreneurial Mindset Assessment scores a founder across seven constructs so you know which part of the person to ask about before you wire anything.
- Items
- 114
- Constructs
- 7
- Sub-constructs
- 41
- Reverse-scored
- 50
- Scale
- 5-point
Every item in the instrument, one square each, grouped by construct. The hollow squares are the 50 written backwards. Agreeing with them counts against the score, so a founder answering to impress has to agree and disagree with the same trait.
Entrepreneurial mindset · 114 items
50
Items written in the negative. A founder answering the way they think you want produces a contradiction rather than a strong profile.
41
Sub-constructs beneath the seven headline scores, so a result points at specific behaviour instead of a broad label.
114
Short items rather than a handful of long ones, so no single misread question can move a construct score.
The problem
Founders are selected on the traits that make a good meeting.
Conviction, fluency, and a clear story are real signals. They are also the traits most easily borrowed for an hour. What decides the outcome three years later is duller: whether the founder adapts when the plan is wrong, keeps going after the round falls through, and converts intention into action without being watched.
Those traits are measurable. They are just not measurable in a pitch.
What comes back
A profile across all seven constructs, plus the sub-construct detail underneath each one. The value is rarely the highest bar. It is the single low bar in an otherwise strong profile, the thing you would not have known to ask about.
Reports are delivered as a PDF profile and an Excel export of the underlying item-level scoring, so your own analysts can go as deep as they want.
What it measures
Seven constructs, 114 items.
Each construct is built from many short items rather than a few long ones, so a single misread question cannot move a score. Fifty items are written in the negative, which means a founder answering the way they think you want produces a contradictory profile instead of a flattering one.
Flexibility
Whether the plan can change without the founder changing with it.
23Resilience
What happens after the first term sheet falls through.
20Achievement
Whether the drive is internal or borrowed from the room.
20Social Intelligence
How they read a co-founder, a hire, a customer who is stalling.
18Self-efficacy
Whether they believe they can do the next hard thing.
14Risk-taking
Calculated exposure against appetite for the gamble.
12Entrepreneurial Action
The gap between intending to start and starting.
7Honest limits
What this does not do.
It does not score the market, the product, or the cap table. It does not predict a return. It does not replace meeting the founder; it tells you what to look for when you do.
Scoring currently uses absolute thresholds rather than population percentiles. We are building the norm set from completed assessments and will say so plainly when it is ready. Anyone selling you validated predictive accuracy on a founder population this small is guessing.
What investors ask us
Does a founder assessment replace reference checks?
No. References tell you what someone did with a particular team under particular conditions. The assessment tells you which traits they bring to the next set of conditions. Run both. They disagree usefully.
What does a low score on one construct mean?
It means that construct is where to spend your diligence, not that the founder is uninvestable. A low risk-taking score alongside strong achievement and resilience describes a specific kind of operator, and whether that fits depends on what you are funding.
Can a founder game the assessment?
Fifty of the 114 items are reverse-scored, so a founder answering to impress produces an internally inconsistent profile rather than a strong one. The scoring surfaces that inconsistency instead of hiding it.
Do you have published validity data?
Not yet, and we will not claim otherwise. The constructs and items are drawn from established psychometric research, and scoring currently uses absolute thresholds. Norm-referenced percentiles arrive once we have enough completed assessments to build them honestly.
Can we use it for hiring rather than investment?
Yes. The same instrument was originally built for recruitment, to identify entrepreneurial thinking in candidates for internal roles. Nothing changes but how you read the output.
Run it on a founder you have already backed.
The fastest way to calibrate the instrument is against someone whose outcome you already know. Tell us who, and we will walk you through the report.