Underwrite the operator carrying the strategy — with the rigor you bring to the numbers.
The financial diligence is commodity. The read on the human is the edge — and it’s the part of most IC memos that’s least defensible. Readiness Engine reads how the GP actually shows up — IC discussions, investor letters, founder calls — and gives you a structured developmental profile of the manager you’re betting on.
Track record, AUM, strategy, terms — and then the section your partners scrutinise least.
Due diligence covers everything except the GP’s capacity to lead under stress: to adapt when the market shifts mid-execution, to keep a team coherent through a drawdown, to hear the analyst who’s right too early. A manager who keeps running the same models after the regime changes doesn’t show up in the tearsheet — until the alpha is gone.
Reads
Decision-making under pressure
How conviction and flexibility coexist when positions move against the book — read from real IC discussion, not a pitch meeting.
Reads
Adaptive capacity across cycles
Whether the process evolves when the market does — and whether the explanation after a drawdown names the positioning or blames the weather.
Reads
Team cohesion under stress
Whether the team still tells the GP the truth in month nine of a bad year. Retention risk is readable before the departures happen.
The track record that hid the truth.
The Situation
A $25M allocation under evaluation. Ten years of top-quartile returns, institutional LPs on the register, impeccable credentials.
The Read
High on analytical rigor and pattern recognition. Not yet consistent on team dynamics and communication under stress — a pattern of going opaque when challenged.
What Deeper Diligence Found
During the 2020 drawdown the GP went quiet on LPs for six weeks, two senior analysts left, and the post-mortem blamed “irrational markets” rather than positioning.
The Outcome
The family office passed. In the next correction the fund underperformed by 400 bps and three institutional LPs redeemed. The structured read had named the pattern first.
Backed by the people who study capital stewardship
Our founding advisor and first investor is Ashby Monk — Stanford professor and Executive Director of the Long-Term Investing research center, and a partner at KDX.
The read on the human is the least defensible section of most IC memos. It’s the section this instrument is built to document — with the same rigor allocators already bring to the numbers.
Meet the team behind the instrument →The Optional Multiplier
What changes when you add coaching.
The assessment tells you where leadership capacity sits across a portfolio or a management team. Coaching is the lever that moves it — practitioner-led work at the growth edge the profile names, closed with a reassessment that shows what shifted.
Concrete outcome: a management team that can hold the complexity of the value-creation thesis under pressure — rather than contracting to old patterns when the plan meets resistance.
How coaching works with the read →