Day 2: Contributor diversity

The bus-factor signal — Gini coefficient at month -3.

Yesterday

Yesterday you read commit velocity. Today's signal layers on top: even sharp acceleration concentrated in one committer is a different bet than sharp acceleration spread across four.

Why this signal matters

In the panel of 219 funded rounds, startups that closed had a contributor-diversity Gini of ~0.34 at month -3. Startups that did not close had ~0.61. More distributed codebases close more rounds.

The 5-minute exercise

1Open the org's most-active repo.
2Click Insights → Contributors. Set the date range to the last 90 days.
3Count: how many contributors have ≥10 commits over 90 days?
4Look at the top contributor's share. Is it > 50% of total commits? > 80%?

What you’re filtering for

A team where the top contributor is <50% of the volume and at least 4 people have 10+ commits. That's a real engineering team. Anything else is one founder with a side project, or a consultancy.

Edge case

Mono-repo orgs concentrate everything in one repo and look more diverse than they are. Cross-check with the org-level contributor list at github.com/orgs/[org]/people if it's public.

Bonus

A single-bus-factor codebase means the round is essentially funding one person's salary. A 4-person codebase is funding a team. The contract value, the dilution math, and the diligence story are all different.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow: the dependents graph — who's already building on top of this startup's code.

Curriculum: /challenge · Methodology: /methodology · Paper: ssrn.com/abstract=6606558