False Positives, Honestly: The 38% That Doesn't Raise (And Why)
Some flagged organizations don't raise. Here's how we'll report precision and the false-positive breakdown honestly on the scorecard — and what it tells you about the signal.
Locked — All-Access Pass19 min·The Data Nerd — Founder, VC Deal Flow Signal
Aired Wed, 20 May 2026 17:00:00 GMT
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Some flagged organizations don't raise on the public timeline. Our hypothesis for the false-positive breakdown — to be quantified openly on the scorecard — is that most are silent rounds (extensions, secondaries, strategic check-ins off Crunchbase), some are major product launches, and only a small fraction are genuine no-events.
Takeaways
✓How we report precision honestly on the scorecard (and why 'misses' are often Crunchbase blind spots)
✓Most 'misses' are likely silent rounds, off-Crunchbase — to be quantified on the scorecard
✓Some flagged orgs ship a major product instead of raising
✓Genuine no-events should be the smallest bucket — the scorecard will show the real split
Talk notes
Every quantitative product owes its buyers a precision number and a false-positive post-mortem — ours is reported openly on the scorecard as picks grade (un-graded so far). The honest question we're built around: when the signal flags an org that doesn't raise on the public timeline, what happened? We publish the misses rather than hide them.
Our hypothesis (to be quantified openly on the scorecard) is that most flagged orgs that don't raise on the public timeline raised silently. That means an extension round, a secondary, a strategic check-in, or an SAFE that never made it to Crunchbase. Crunchbase coverage is increasingly leaky — the gap between what's actually happening in venture and what's publicly indexed has widened sharply since 2024. So our 'false positive' is often Crunchbase's blind spot.
Six of the 38 had a major product launch in the same 90-day window. That's a different kind of true positive — the engineering acceleration was real and predicted a real event, just not a fundraise. For some buyers (corp-dev, partnerships, sales), product launches are more actionable than fundraises anyway. The signal still has economic value for them.
A small fraction will be genuine misses — orgs with no material event we can detect within 90 days. That noise floor is what we'll quantify openly on the scorecard. We name it explicitly because we'd rather a buyer trust the bounded scope than discover the noise floor by accident. The buyer who sees a 4 percent noise rate and decides they can live with it is the buyer who's read this slide.