Talk notes
This is the core claim — the single belief that, if true, makes everything else fall. Ours is one sentence: GitHub commit-velocity acceleration is the most leading public signal in venture capital. If that's true, every other sourcing surface — pitch decks, AngelList, Crunchbase, warm intros — is downstream. If it's false, we have nothing to sell. The whole product, the whole methodology, the whole summit collapses on that single empirical claim.
The empirical foundation is a longitudinal panel of 219 venture-backed startups across 19 sectors and five quarterly observation periods, indexed on SSRN under DOI 10.2139/ssrn.6606558 and released CC BY 4.0. Companies that registered a 2× contributor influx coupled with a 14-day commit-velocity acceleration preceded fundraise announcements by a median 31 days, with a 21-to-47-day interquartile range. Precision at the 90-day horizon is 62 percent.
The point of opening with this is simple. If you don't accept the core claim, the next 19 talks are noise — interesting tactics on a wrong premise. If you do accept it, then the next 19 talks become a sourcing operating system. So the rest of Day 1 is spent making the core claim unfalsifiable: the methodology walkthrough, the open-source regression code, the named limitations. By the end of Day 1, every objection has a public answer.
We close with a thought experiment. If the warm-intro economy worked, fundraises would distribute uniformly across founders. They don't — they cluster around the 8 percent of partners with the deepest rolodexes. Code, by contrast, is published the same week regardless of which time zone you live in. That asymmetry is the structural opportunity the core claim points at.