The full explanation
Twenty-two elemental dimensions that measure what a company is and what it does. Fifteen composite dimensions that measure how the elemental pieces fit together. Each graded on a five-level evidence scale. Together, they produce the analyst-grade assessment.
Interactive Chart
Both maps below are outputs from the Urban Forests assessments — Urban Forests B.V. is a fictional Dutch climate-tech spin-out (for obvious reasons). Toggle between Public-Source DD and Confidential-Source DD to see what each evidence depth surfaces. Hover any axis for the score, evidence level, and the comparison value from the other run.
Value Map: all 22 elemental pillars. The grey constraint line shows the score boundary. The dashed green polygon shows the evidence-weighted (proven) value. The amber gap between them is hidden value — real but not yet validated.
Want to see the maps in their native context? Public-Source DD → · Confidential-Source DD →
The architecture
Most assessment frameworks are a flat list — customer, team, market, product, and so on. That works up to a point, but it hides the question that actually matters to investors: whether the pieces fit together. A company can be strong on five dimensions individually and still fail because those five don't cohere. Another can look weaker on any single dimension but hold together architecturally.
We separate the two questions deliberately. The 22 elemental dimensions assess discrete, directly observable properties — is the customer sharply defined, is the pain validated, does the team have the composition to execute. Each can be scored on its own and evidenced on its own. These are the pillars.
The 15 composite dimensions assess architectural properties — things that only emerge from the combination of elementals. Category creation, for instance, is not a dimension on its own. It's what happens when differentiation, timing, unfair advantage, and vision all hold together. Each composite is a geometric combination of its component elementals, which means a single weak elemental collapses the composite — on purpose. Architecture fails on its weakest link.
This two-layer architecture is also why the framework produces discriminating results even when company stage varies widely. A seed-stage company and a Series B company are both scored across the same 37 dimensions, but what each dimension's score means is modulated by the five evidence levels — assertion, anecdote, proof, behaviour, and third-party validation. A Series B company at 50 on Customer Definition with third-party validated evidence is a different company from a seed-stage one at 50 on a founder assertion, even though the dimension score is the same.
Elemental dimensions
Directly observable properties of the company. Grouped into five categories that together describe the arc from the problem being solved to the impact of solving it. Each pillar has a code, a question, and a scoring rubric with bands from 0–100.
Why them?
Is the customer sharply defined — named people or tightly-bounded groups whose behaviour predicts purchase? The test is whether the founder can point to actual buyers, not demographic categories like "SMEs" or "millennials." Strong definition narrows; weak definition generalises.
Why worth solving?
Is the pain real, structural, and described by the customer in their own words? Strong evidence is the customer articulating the problem without prompting and estimating what it costs them. Weak evidence is the founder articulating pain on the customer's behalf.
Why need-to-have?
Is the solution something the customer must have, or nice to have? Bitching ain't switching — customers can complain loudly and still do nothing. Need-to-have is measured by behaviour: contracts signed, money on the table, switches made from a working alternative.
Why better?
Is the offering meaningfully differentiated from alternatives — and is the difference one customers act on? The bar rises from founder-claimed differentiation to customer-confirmed choice to repeat purchase after seeing alternatives. "Category of one" at the top; undifferentiated features at the bottom.
Why this moment?
Why does this opportunity exist at this moment rather than five years ago or five years from now? Strong evidence names a specific trigger — regulation, technology threshold, behaviour change — and connects it to customer behaviour. Weak evidence is generic trend-citation.
Why you?
Does the founder have asymmetric insight, access, or capability that a generic competitor cannot easily replicate? Not "we know this market" but something structural — a proprietary relationship, a technical breakthrough, a combination of experiences nobody else has assembled.
How monetise?
How does the business convert value into revenue, and do the unit economics work? Evidence moves from stated pricing intent to signed contracts to realised gross margin across a customer cohort. Pricing power — the ability to charge what the value is worth — is the ceiling.
How acquire?
How does the business reach customers at a cost proportionate to lifetime value? Strong acquisition shows repeatable channels with measurable CAC and payback period. Weak acquisition relies on founder hustle, one-off partnerships, or channels that don't scale without capital.
How win?
Does the company have a coherent plan to reach its stated future, with sequenced choices about what to do and what not to do? Strong strategy names trade-offs and shows why this path is preferable to alternatives. Weak strategy is a list of everything the company wants to accomplish.
Why this future?
Does the company have an articulated long-horizon thesis about how the world should be different, and is the current product a credible path there? Vision is not a grand statement — it's a structural claim about what the business becomes when it works, and why that future is worth building toward.
Who else?
Does the team have the composition to execute the strategy — and is the founder honest about the gaps? Strong teams name who does what, who needs to be hired next, and what would cause the current team not to work at 10x scale. AI capability counts as a team dimension, up to a ceiling.
Why durable?
Does the competitive position hold under pressure? Moats come in structural flavours — network effects, switching costs, data compounding, regulatory position, brand equity. Temporary advantages are not moats; the test is whether the position strengthens with scale.
What breaks?
What are the specific failure modes, and how is the company prepared for them? Strong risk management names the risks in concrete terms, assigns likelihood and impact, and describes mitigations. Weak risk management treats risks as hypotheticals or argues them away.
What capital?
Is the capital plan matched to what the strategy requires, and is the dilution path sustainable? Strong capital strategy shows runway-to-milestones reasoning, not runway-in-months reasoning. A team raising 2x what the next milestone requires — or 0.5x — is a signal of something misunderstood.
What compounds?
Does growth reinforce itself, or does each new customer cost as much to acquire as the last? Flywheels are architectural: the answer is yes or no based on the structure, not on marketing language. Network effects, data loops, brand accrual, customer-led acquisition compound. Paid acquisition does not.
What else?
Does the current business unlock adjacent opportunities that could be larger than the original? Strong optionality is explicit — the founder names the next adjacent market, what assets or data make entry easy, and what signals would justify pursuit. Weak optionality is "we could also do X" without evidence.
Who watches the watchers?
Does the company have decision structures, oversight, and financial controls proportionate to its stage and capital? Governance is stage-relative: at pre-seed it can be a shareholders' agreement; at Series B it means an independent board, audit processes, and compliance frameworks.
Why this mission?
Is the mission structurally part of the business, or is it marketing bolted on? The test is whether the customer the company serves coincides with the beneficiary the impact targets. If yes, impact scales with revenue. If no, impact is decorative.
How measured?
Can the impact claim be measured with concrete metrics and an auditable methodology? Strong measurability has a documented MRV protocol — measurement, reporting, verification — ideally third-party validated. Weak measurability relies on founder claims and anecdotes.
How big?
Is the potential impact at a scale that matters — locally, nationally, globally? Measured against the underlying problem's scale: 1,000 tonnes of CO2 avoided is meaningful at a city level, marginal at a continental level. Scale always needs a denominator.
Who benefits, how deeply?
How deeply does the company serve each of its stakeholders — customers, beneficiaries, communities, suppliers, employees? Surface-level stakeholder stories are common. Deep relationships with named stakeholders over time are rare — and are what compounds into reputation and durability.
Will it persist?
Does the impact persist beyond the company's current phase — after exits, acquisitions, founder departures, capital changes? Impact is durable when structurally encoded in the product and business model; fragile when it depends on current leadership's preferences.
Composite dimensions
Architectural properties that only emerge from the combination of elementals. Each composite is a geometric combination of its component pillars — a single weak elemental collapses the composite, on purpose. Grouped into four clusters.
Is this company defining a new market, or competing in an existing one?
Category creators do not win an existing market — they name and occupy a new one. That requires a differentiated product, the right moment, a founder advantage that applies to the new space, and a vision that articulates the category before the market has named it. Miss any one, the claim collapses into competing-with-better-features.
From: Competitive Advantage · Why Now · Unfair Advantage · Vision
Does the strategy exploit the moment, or ignore it?
A company can operate in a market where the moment is clearly right and still execute as if the moment were earlier or later. Timing discipline is the architectural property when product differentiation, market timing, and go-to-market strategy all point to the same window. The common failure: a genuine timing opportunity running a playbook designed for a different era.
From: Competitive Advantage · Why Now · Strategy
How easily can a competitor reproduce this position?
Most positions are reproducible if someone else decides to spend the time and capital. The question is how expensive and how long. Founder advantage makes replication by a generic competitor slow; moat structure makes replication by a well-funded competitor expensive; product differentiation widens the starting gap. Inverted: strong defensibility produces a low risk reading.
From: Unfair Advantage · Moat · Competitive Advantage
Does the regulatory environment support or threaten the position?
Heavily regulated markets — health, finance, energy, AI, biotech — live or die on regulatory positioning. The composite reads the interaction of regulatory-sense market timing (how the window is moving), risk response (whether regulatory threats are mitigated), and governance maturity (whether the company can navigate scrutiny). Relevance is sector-dependent.
From: Why Now · Risk Management · Governance
Does the company have the architecture to capture multi-sided value?
Platforms are architectural, not intentional. A company can declare itself a platform without the machinery; another can discover platform dynamics through customer behaviour. The composite tests whether the machinery is in place: multi-sided monetisation, third-party acquisition without bilateral negotiation, self-reinforcing growth loops, genuine optionality to adjacent use cases.
From: Monetisation · Customer Acquisition · Flywheel · Optionality
Does willingness to pay support a sustainable cost of acquisition?
The unit-economics question most investors ask in the first ten minutes of diligence. Willingness to pay sets the price the market bears; monetisation converts willingness into captured value; acquisition determines how expensively that value is reached. Weak on any axis and the model leaks. Strong distribution economics distinguishes venture-backable businesses from consulting-scale ones.
From: Need-to-Have · Monetisation · Customer Acquisition
Does the advantage strengthen over time or decay?
Most advantages decay. The founder's insight becomes known; the patent expires; the data advantage commoditises. A compounding moat is the architectural property where an advantage strengthens with use: network effects that densify with scale, data loops that improve with query volume, switching costs that deepen with tenure.
From: Unfair Advantage · Moat · Flywheel
Can this company fund growth from its own economics, or is it capital-hungry?
The difference between a business that compounds from its own cash generation and one that requires continuous external funding. Monetisation produces cash per customer; disciplined capital strategy deploys that cash against milestones; a working growth loop means each deployment earns back more than it cost. In the current venture climate, this has shifted from nice-to-have to primary filter.
From: Monetisation · Capital Strategy · Flywheel
Can this company charge what the value is worth, or is it commoditised?
Pricing power is architectural. It emerges when the customer is in enough pain that they genuinely need a solution, the product delivers something competitors cannot match, and the company is structurally defended against being undercut. All four true at once produces margin that survives contact with procurement. Three of four produces margin that lasts only until a well-funded competitor shows up.
From: Pain Point · Need-to-Have · Unfair Advantage · Moat
Does the company have the coherence to execute the strategy it has described?
Where many strong-on-paper companies quietly fail. A clear strategy, a capable team, credible risk mitigation, and a well-matched capital plan sound like four ordinary things — the diagnostic power is in requiring them to be coherent with each other. Team aligned to strategy, risk plan calibrated to strategy, capital plan paced to strategy.
From: Strategy · Team · Risk Management · Capital Strategy
Can this company absorb growth capital without breaking?
Different from Execution Coherence — that asks whether the plan can be executed. Scale readiness asks whether the company survives what happens after institutional capital arrives: monthly reporting, board governance, compliance frameworks, employment structures beyond the founding team, risk exposure requiring formal mitigation. The transition from seed to Series A is where this typically binds.
From: Team · Capital Strategy · Governance · Risk Management
Does the founder have the insight, the team to convert it, and the problem to apply it to?
Often reduced to "the founder understands the problem." The composite tests something sharper: the intersection of founder insight that specifically applies to this market, team composition that can convert the insight into execution, and a problem with enough underlying pain to absorb it. The composite surfaces which of the three is weak when the other two look good.
From: Unfair Advantage · Team · Pain Point
Can the team build the product the strategy demands?
A deep-tech team with a commercialisation strategy and a differentiated product should cohere. Frequently they don't. The research team builds what it knows how to build; the commercial leader targets what they know how to sell; the product lands somewhere in between — either too technical for the market or too generic for the advantage. The composite reads all three as a three-way coherence test.
From: Team · Strategy · Competitive Advantage
Is the customer the beneficiary, or is impact bolted on alongside the commercial model?
The discipline test for impact-native companies is simple: does the customer the company sells to coincide with the beneficiary the impact targets? If yes, impact scales with revenue. If no, impact is bolted on — the company has a commercial customer and a separate impact story, and revenue growth does not automatically produce impact growth.
From: Impact Intentionality · Customer Definition · Need-to-Have · Stakeholder Depth
Do governance structures actually encode stakeholder interests?
Distinguishes B Corps that restructured governance from B Corps that just passed the assessment. Stated intent, depth of stakeholder service, and governance structure must cohere. High scores indicate impact that survives founder transitions, acquisitions, and capital changes. Low scores indicate impact that lives in marketing and will not survive the first commercial pressure.
From: Impact Intentionality · Stakeholder Depth · Governance
Evidence grading
Every dimension score is paired with an evidence level. A score of 60 at E1 (assertion) is fundamentally different from a score of 60 at E4 (behavioural evidence). The level describes how reliable the observation is — not what the score says, but how much to trust it.
Founder-stated. "We think our customers want X." No external evidence yet. The hypothesis exists; the test has not been run.
Specific examples, unstructured signal. Conversations, emails, a customer quoted saying the right thing. Real but not systematic.
Structured evidence with a documented method. Survey data, pilot results, third-party coverage — enough that a skeptic would be persuaded.
Customers are acting on it. Paid contracts, paid usage, retention data, revenue growth. The behaviour itself is the evidence.
Independently audited, reported, or benchmarked. Published financials, certified measurement, peer-reviewed outcomes. Outside the company's control to claim.
A readiness gate result factors in both the score and the evidence level behind it. A high score at E1 cannot pass a gate — confidence without validation is not the same as validation.
Thirty-seven dimensions is not thirty-seven things to score. It is the minimum number needed to separate what is visible from what is architectural — and to distinguish strong companies from ones that merely look strong.