Conclusion — What to Do on Monday Morning

If you read this book straight through and then put it down without changing anything you do on Monday morning, the book has failed. The signals are real, the methodology is reproducible, the historical record is in your favour — but none of that produces a different deal-flow funnel unless the workflow is actually run.

This conclusion is therefore a checklist. It is intentionally short.

The Monday checklist

Before nine a.m. on Monday morning.

1. Open your watchlist. If you do not have one, write down the names of fifteen to thirty companies you are interested in, with one line per company including the GitHub organization handle. Fifteen is enough to start; thirty is the maximum for a manual workflow before you need automation.

1. For each company, run Signal 1 — the fourteen-day commit-velocity acceleration with two-period confirmation. The script in the methodology chapter takes about thirty seconds per organization. For thirty organizations, budget fifteen minutes.

1. Note any firings — the small list of companies whose primary repository is showing two-hundred-per-cent acceleration with two-period confirmation. For most weeks this list will be one to four companies. Some weeks it will be empty. Both are normal.

1. For each firing, run Signal 2 — the contributor influx — and Signal 6 if the company is a developer-tools company. Note any concurrent firings.

Before noon on Monday morning.

1. For each concurrent firing, do the LinkedIn cross-reference on the new contributors. Confirm at least one of the new contributors as a recent hire. This takes about two minutes per firing.

1. For each confirmed-as-real concurrent firing, write a short founder reach-out. Plain text, no marketing copy, lead with a specific observation about the public commit graph. Three sentences. Send.

1. Subscribe to the free GitDealFlow Signal Digest at gitdealflow.com if you have not already. The digest delivers every Monday before nine a.m. Eastern and contains the top five firings across the entire universe of tracked organizations — not just your watchlist. The free digest catches the firings on companies you would never have put on your own watchlist, and those are usually the ones with the highest carry potential.

That is the whole Monday workflow. It takes between thirty and ninety minutes depending on the size of the watchlist and how many firings need cross-referencing. If you do this every Monday for a quarter, the deal-flow funnel that lands on your desk will be measurably different from the one that lands on the desk of the investor who is still relying on warm intros and Crunchbase Pro.

The compound effect of this workflow is real. It is also small per week and only visible in retrospect. Do not expect a transformative conversation in week one. Expect, by week twelve, to be in three or four conversations that you would not have been in otherwise — and to have walked away from one or two firings that turned out, on closer inspection, to be false positives. That ratio is the point.

Three honest failure modes

Three things will go wrong if you adopt this workflow. I want to name them so you do not feel like you are doing it wrong when they happen.

The first quarter will feel slow. The lead times for the signals are weeks, not days, and the conversation circuit takes longer than the lead times. You will run the workflow for six or eight Mondays before you have a single closed conversation that you can attribute directly to the workflow. This is not a sign that the workflow is broken; it is a sign that the workflow is operating at its actual lead time. Stick with it.

You will catch a false positive that feels like a true positive. Around week six or eight you will have a strong-feeling firing, you will reach out to the founder, the conversation will go well, and the company will turn out to be preparing for something other than a Series A — an acquisition, a product launch, a pivot. The conversation will not have been wasted, but it will not have produced the carry you expected. This is normal. The seven-signal stack has a sixty-eight per cent hit rate, which means a thirty-two per cent miss rate, and you cannot tell which side of the line a particular firing is on until the round-or-not-round event closes. Treat false positives as part of the cost of the funnel, not as evidence that the funnel does not work.

You will be tempted to skip the methodology and trust the GitDealFlow leaderboard directly. I run the GitDealFlow leaderboard. I would be flattered if you trusted it. I am also telling you not to. The reason is that the leaderboard is a convenience layer over the methodology. If you trust the leaderboard without ever having computed a signal yourself, you do not actually know what the leaderboard is computing, and you cannot defend the use of the leaderboard to your partners or your LPs. Compute one or two signals by hand, against the appendix walkthrough, in your first month. Then trust the leaderboard, with full understanding of what it is doing.

The case for treating public data as the new private network

If there is one organising idea I want you to take from this book, it is this: the public surface of a Series-A-bound startup is more honest, more current, and more comprehensive than the private network around it.

The private network — the warm-intro circuit, the partner-track relationship layer, the "this person is going to raise" whispers — is genuinely valuable when it works, and it does work. But it is not a level playing field. It is, structurally, the playing field of investors who have spent a decade compounding a Rolodex. New entrants to venture capital, including most developer-investors, do not have that Rolodex. They cannot manufacture one in the time the seed-round window stays open.

What new entrants do have is the public surface. They can read commit logs, contributor graphs, dependency trees, conference talks, and engineering blog posts as fluently as a senior partner reads body language at a dinner. The skills are different, but the resulting edge is comparable, and the public-data edge has the structural property that it does not depend on access. The data is there. Anybody who reads this book can use it, indefinitely, on a zero-budget infrastructure footprint.

This does not mean the warm-intro circuit is dying. It is not. The warm-intro circuit will outlive me, you, and this book. But it has been the only path into early-stage venture for a long time, and it is no longer the only path. There is now a parallel path, built on public data, accessible to anyone with a personal access token and a willingness to read this book. That is the thing this book is, in the end, trying to help build: a wider, more accessible, more falsifiable path to early-stage venture capital, on a foundation of data that nobody can paywall.

If that succeeds — even partially — then the kind of deal flow that landed on Series A partners' desks in 2018 will be available, in 2028, to a much wider community of developer-investors and small-fund analysts. That is a better venture-capital industry. It is what I want to be part of building, and I think this book is a contribution to that.

A request

If this book is useful to you, please tell another investor about it. Word-of-mouth is the only meaningful distribution channel for a book like this; there is no advertising budget. The free PDF and EPUB downloads at gitdealflow.com/book are sized to be sent as an email attachment without scaring anyone's spam filter.

If a chapter is wrong, or a threshold is poorly calibrated, or a methodology step does not reproduce, please write to signal@gitdealflow.com. The next edition will fold in your correction with attribution. The methodology is meant to be improved over time, not preserved as scripture.

If you read the book, run the workflow, and close a deal that you can attribute even partially to a signal in here, write and tell me. I will not publish the deal — anonymity is a foundational rule of this project — but the count of attribution-positive deals is the only metric I track that matters, and I will be grateful for the data point.

Thank you for reading. Now turn the page on this book and open your terminal. The signals are waiting.