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About the founder · The Attractive Character
This is the page Russell Brunson would say I owe you — the one where you find out who I am, why I built this, and whether I’m the kind of person you want signal from. Skim the headers if you’re in a hurry.
01 · Identity
I’ve shipped production code for fifteen-plus years. I write angel checks somewhere between deal #5 and deal #40 of my career — small, infrequent, mostly into AI infra and devtools. I am not a GP. I do not run a fund. I do not have a portfolio company that needs fundraising help. I built this product because the data felt obviously valuable and nobody was packaging it for the way I source deals.
I publish under The Data Nerd — a handle, not a brand. The methodology paper on SSRN uses my real name behind a Sipiteno Ltd. corporate veil; everything on this site uses initials. I don’t do podcasts, I don’t do video interviews, I don’t do photos. The signal is the product. I’m the person who computes it.
02 · Backstory
In 2024 I was tracking a small fintech team — three founders, one repo, no press, no AngelList buzz, no warm intros circulating in my network. They had a beautifully boring product I happened to think was structurally underestimated by the consensus. I was going to write the email. I never did. Two weeks later their commit velocity tripled, four new contributors joined, three new infrastructure repos spun up. Three weeks after that they announced a $4M Series A led by a top-tier fund.
The angle bothered me for a month. Every signal I needed was public. The commit graph, the contributor list, the README diff. None of it was inside their company. It was on github.com. Free. Updating in real time. The investors who got in had either (a) been told by a warm intro, which is fine but slow, or (b) been watching the same data I had access to and acting faster. I built this product because I was tired of being in column (a) and one quarter late.
03 · Three parables
Parable 1 · The Unknown Lighthouse Keeper
A lighthouse keeper notices a particular flock of seabirds arrive a week before every storm. He doesn’t know why. He only knows that when the birds arrive, ships should already be in harbour. The fishermen who follow him stop losing boats. The ones who say “birds aren’t weather data” keep losing them. Engineering acceleration is the seabird flock. It doesn’t prove the storm. It precedes it reliably enough that ignoring it is the expensive choice.
Parable 2 · The Loud Engine
Two cars start a race. One is silent at the line. The other idles loud, builds revs, the driver checks his mirrors, the passenger fastens her belt. The silent car may win — but the loud one is doing every observable thing a car about to launch does. Code is the engine of a startup. When the engine is visibly louder for two weeks running, the launch usually follows. We aren’t reading the future. We’re reading the things that always happen right before the future arrives.
Parable 3 · The Letter the Postman Already Read
Imagine the postman could read every letter in his bag. The richest man in town wouldn’t pay him for tomorrow’s letters — those aren’t in the bag yet. He’d pay him for today’s letters delivered three days early. GitHub already wrote the letters. Crunchbase reads them on the day they land. We open them in transit. Everyone else gets the same mail we do — they just get it the week after the founder posted on LinkedIn.
04 · Polarity
05 · Character flaws
Brunson says the Attractive Character has visible flaws because without them you sound like a brochure. These are real. If they’re dealbreakers, this product probably isn’t for you and that’s OK.
06 · What this means for you
Start with the 12-minute Perfect Webinar for the long version of why GitHub momentum is the most leading public deal-flow signal. Or skip to the Origin story for the long version of how I came to believe the warm-intro funnel was structurally broken. The product itself is at the Funnel Hub with all nine doors mapped.