Loading...
About the founder · The Data Nerd
This is the page 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.
Start with the highest-intent routes
Use this page if you need to judge the person behind the signal. But if your real question is methodology, origin, or buyer-side evaluation, start with the proof stack first.
00 · Identity archetype
The four archetypes a founder character can occupy are Leader, Adventurer, Reluctant Hero, and Reporter. Leaders front-load conviction; Adventurers front-load risk; Reluctant Heroes front-load reluctance; Reporters front-load curiosity. I'm the fourth one with a touch of the third — a Reluctant Reporter. The first time I noticed the seabird flock I thought I was seeing a coincidence. The fifth time I checked I knew I owed the fishermen the warning. The product on this site is the warning, formalised.
In contrast: Not a Leader (I won't take stage), not an Adventurer (I won't sell risk as romance), not a pure Reluctant Hero (I'm not waiting to be drafted) — a Reporter who can't unsee the pattern and a Reluctant Hero about whether the discovery is mine to publish.
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 a handle. 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. In plain English: they were suddenly shipping far more than usual, the team doubled overnight, and they’d started building the thing competitors copy in a year. 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. You never read a line of code — the read is done for you.
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
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 · The tribe
“We move on the engineering signal before the round — without reading a line of code.”
The reader who nods through the polarity is a First Mover — a solo angel, scout, seed fund, corp-dev or PE operator who evaluates companies for a living but doesn't read code and doesn't want to. The handle the reader earns is 'first mover': the investor who reaches the founder before the round, on a signal someone else translated into plain English. The product is built around that identity. The pricing is built around that identity. Every page on this site is built around that identity. If the label feels off — if you'd rather pull up the merge graph and run the regression yourself — that's diagnostic, and the product is probably wrong for you.
07 · This week
Updated every Monday. Five fields, no more. The cadence is the character.
08 · Twelve months from now
Read this on 2027-05-09 and grade against what shipped. That’s the credibility test. The character either kept the commitments or admits which one broke and why.
Commit 1 — Still anonymous.
No founder face, no real voice, no real-name media tour. If a podcast audience grows by 100K through breaking the rule, the rule still holds. The whole product rests on whether this commitment is kept; the day it breaks is the day the methodology has to compete with personality, and it loses.
Commit 2 — Twelve State-of-Engine addresses on the record.
One per month, every month, May 2026 → April 2027. Each one with a falsifiable prediction graded the following month. Twelve in a row is the cadence proof — eleven is a project, twelve is a practice.
Commit 3 — /scorecard published with at least 80 weekly picks graded.
Twelve months × 4–5 weekly picks per Sunday = ~52 grading windows by May 2027. Hit/Miss/Pending public, no curation. If the published precision drops below 60% across the panel, the price drops with it — the credibility chain has to hold both directions.
Commit 4 — One additional methodology author on the SSRN paper.
Co-author named — credit shared. Not because the work needs help (it doesn't) but because a methodology that lives in one anonymous head is one regression-rewrite away from breaking. A second name on the next preprint version is a continuity commitment to the buyer.
Commit 5 — Insider Circle at 200 paid members or the price drops.
Founding-member rate locked at €97/mo until 200 active subscribers, then a 60-day notice and a public price hike. The cohort closes when the math closes. Members who joined early stay at the locked rate forever.
09 · The fuller character bible
If you want the long version — six parables (three more than on this page), seven voice rules the site is audited against, the synthetic-voice disclosure, and the six surfaces where you’ll meet the same handle — that lives at the canonical character page. Same handle, same voice, more density.
Read the Data Nerd character bible →10 · What this means for you
Start with the 12-minute walkthrough 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.