Methodology
How statements become claims, how sources are labelled, and how organizations are categorised. These labels appear throughout the site; this page defines them.
Evidence labels
Attached to every claim. The label describes who made the statement and whether it has been independently measured, not whether the research believes it.
- Company reported
- Stated by the company, its founders or management. Not independently verified.
- Investor reported
- Stated by an investor or sponsor about a portfolio company.
- Independent reporting
- Reported by a journalist, trade publication or other third party.
- Filing
- Taken from a regulatory or legal filing.
- Documented record
- Supported by an official record, announcement or reference page.
- Testimonial
- A customer or partner statement published by the company.
- Attributed opinion
- A viewpoint attributed to a named author or speaker; not a fact claim.
- Analysis
- Interpretation, classification or calculation made by this research project.
- Unverified
- A lead or assertion that has not been reviewed against its source.
- Disputed / unreconciled
- Sources disagree or the definition could not be reconciled.
- Forecast or target
- A target, plan or forecast; not a reported result.
- Superseded
- Replaced by a later or more precise claim.
- Needs review
- Status not yet assigned.
Access status
Attached to every source. Describes how much of the original the research was able to read.
- Reviewed
- The substantive text was opened and read by the research.
- Partially reviewed
- Only part of the source was read: show notes, transcript sections, a paywall preview or a render-limited page.
- Search excerpt only
- Only the title and a search-result excerpt were seen. Listed as a lead; not evidence.
- Not opened
- Captured as a title and URL only; never opened. Listed as a lead; not evidence.
- Unavailable
- The page could not be retrieved (removed, blocked or offline) when the research tried.
Organization categories
Every organization record is placed in one category so that investors, operating companies, acquired businesses and publishers are not presented as interchangeable “companies”.
- Holding company or platform
- Holding company or platform
- Investor or company builder
- Investor or company builder
- Acquired or operating business
- Acquired or operating business
- Adjacent software vendor
- Adjacent software vendor
- Comparator
- Comparator
- Publisher or source
- Publisher or source
- Excluded identity
- Excluded identity
- Unclassified
- Unclassified
Content formats
Sources are grouped into these formats in the archive. The raw type recorded by the research is preserved on each source page.
Who a claim is about
The original research linked each claim to a bag of organizations without saying which one the statement was about. On a dashboard that would attribute a portfolio company’s productivity result to its investor. The site therefore derives a role for each organization on each claim — subject, investor, acquirer, acquired, partner, reporter or contextual mention — from the statement text, and flags ambiguous cases for owner review. Only subject, acquired, acquirer and partner roles populate a company’s evidence tables; investor and reporter roles appear in a separate “statements where this organization is the investor or reporter” view.
Visibility
A reviewed source is public even when no claim was extracted from it: it is reading material and attribution. A source captured only as a title and URL from search results is a lead: listed in a separate archive view, never cited as evidence. Raw external packets that were indexed without fact-checking stay private until reviewed. Publishing a source never upgrades the evidence label of the claims it supports.
Coverage levels
Dossier means a full research document exists and its sections are shown on the dashboard. Profile means several reviewed claims exist but no dossier. Limited coverage means the organization was named in the research (often as a candidate in an imported directory) but not independently researched. Limited-coverage records are kept filterable and never displace dossiers on the homepage.
Import rules and the reconciliation report for the current database are kept with the repository and in the owner workspace. See also About.