What a partner sees first
The output is not a trend newsletter and it is not a blind score list. It is a tiered review packet that keeps owner-ready rows separate from good/decent companies, market signals, and manual evidence gaps.
June 2026 blessed baseline: 1 Assign Owner row, 13 Partner Review companies, 8 Review-Worthy companies, 5 Review-Worthy market signals, 12 Evidence Gap rows, and 0 unsafe promotions.
June 2 repeatability check: three safe validations kept unsafe promotions at 0 and repeatedly produced Partner Review / Market Signal / Evidence Gap rows, but only repeated 1 strict Review-Worthy Company. The system is conservative; source evidence yield is not repeatable enough yet.
Latest workflow update: Product Hunt, YC, and X are exercised by default with bounded limits; Product Hunt/X rows get targeted Exa-first hard-evidence resolution by default; broad last30days paid grounding remains opt-in. Every weekly run now writes a canonical quality gate that labels passing, partial, thin, and smoke runs, so Claude summarizes the generated packet instead of replacing it with ad hoc research.
| Tier | Example | Source | What It Means | Next Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assign Owner | Voker | HN launch | Strong enough company evidence to route for ownership. | Assign owner / partner follow-up. |
| Partner Review | SocialEcho 2.0 | Product Hunt | Real product/company surface, but missing maturity metadata. | Inspect founders, stage, headcount, and customer proof. |
| Market Signal | affaan-m/agentshield | GitHub | OSS momentum reveals market direction even if no company is formed yet. | Use theme to search for companies and track formation. |
| Evidence Gap | Databox MCP | Product Hunt | Promising but blocked by a specific missing field. | Find founder/operator identity before promotion. |
How the weekly radar works
The important idea: launch chatter is a starting signal, not the answer. The system has to resolve the official domain, inspect the company surface, separate companies from market signals, and explain every gap.
Setup path that avoids the common failures
The setup flow is deliberately boring now: it checks the runtime and provider access before the radar command is trusted.
Runtime dependency check
The adapter reports the exact Python runtime it will use and whether `requests` imports there. Setup installs into that runtime, not a random system `python3`.
Provider key normalization
Product Hunt, Exa, GitHub, Attio, and X are checked explicitly. X accepts `AUTH_TOKEN`/`CT0` and `TWITTER_AUTH_TOKEN`/`TWITTER_CT0`; cookie-based X also checks Node.js for the bundled bird backend. Attio is checked from the vc-signals config path too.
Bounded default source exercise
A normal weekly run now uses bounded Product Hunt, YC, and X limits. A first-pass run keeps smaller limits for onboarding, but it no longer silently skips these lanes.
Paid-search discipline
Targeted Exa hard evidence is default for Product Hunt/X rows. Broad last30days paid grounding remains off unless the user explicitly enables it and previews cost.
What each section means
Assign Owner
The strictest tier. These rows have enough evidence to route to a human owner without over-promoting weak launch chatter.
Partner Review Companies
Good/decent companies a partner should inspect. These may still need founder, stage, funding, headcount, customer, or LinkedIn-style checks.
Review-Worthy Market Signals
OSS and theme movement that tells us where the market is going. These are valuable even when no company exists yet.
Evidence Gap Queue
Promising rows blocked by exact missing evidence: official domain, founder/team, stage, funding, headcount, pricing, docs, customers, or careers.
Manual Evidence Queue
A focused 30-45 minute analyst workflow: exact checks, evidence hints, unresolved gaps, what would promote the row, and what would discard it.
Source Health and Caveats
Shows which providers worked, degraded, timed out, returned thin evidence, or consumed paid-search budget. Broad last30days grounding is opt-in and previewed before intentional deep runs.
Market Sector is not Source Lane
This distinction makes the radar easier to read. A row can be about Cybersecurity even if the evidence came from GitHub.
| Field | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Market Sector | The investment category Marathon cares about. | Cybersecurity, AI Infra, Devtools, Data Infra, Vertical AI |
| Source Lane | Where the evidence came from. | Grounded web, OSS, Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Attio-aware |
| Theme | The emerging problem or market motion. | AI agent security, agent runtime infrastructure, AI data quality |
How sources are used
Company evidence
YC rows, HN launches, Product Hunt launches, official websites, pricing, docs, customers, careers, founder pages, and company metadata can become review rows.
Launch and social radar
Product Hunt is treated as a launch source, not identity truth. X is treated as launch radar. Both can point us to official domains and operators, but verified company identity must come from official sites, founders, company pages, or manual/structured evidence.
Market radar
GitHub is not only company discovery. Fast-growing repos can reveal themes, wedges, and user demand before a company has formed.
Honest caveat
Evidence yield is still the hard part
The current baseline proves the packet shape and strict gates work. The June 2 repeatability run shows the source-yield ceiling: the broader safe run produced 14 Partner Review companies, 1 strict Review-Worthy Company, 5 market signals, 12 evidence gaps, and 0 unsafe promotions. Product Hunt resolved 8 official domains from 15 hard-evidence investigations; X returned 2 launch rows but 0 resolved official domains. The latest update makes those source lanes run by default and resolves Product Hunt/X rows with targeted hard evidence, but founder/stage/headcount evidence can still need manual review or structured metadata access.
Scoring model
The radar keeps interest and confidence separate. That lets Marathon see promising weak signals without confusing them for fully verified opportunities.
Investment Interest
How interesting the opportunity is if the evidence holds: timing, market pain, technical specificity, wedge, freshness, and fit for Seed to Series B.
Evidence Confidence
How much the system trusts the evidence: source quality, company identity, recency, corroboration, founder/company links, and CRM context.
Assign Owner Partner Review Review-Worthy Company Market Signal Evidence Gap
Current blessed files
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
| source-yield-validation-report.md | The human-readable current packet: tiers, rows, gaps, source health, and caveats. |
| partner-decision-packet.json | Strict owner/action packet for high-confidence routing. |
| quality-gate.json | Canonical verdict that says whether the run is passing, partial, thin, or smoke, with source lane and row-count checks. |
| ledger-action-report.json | Promotion audit; unsafe owner promotions must remain zero. |
| targeted-manual-enrichment.json | Focused checks for the top evidence gaps. |
| structured-provider-trial.json | Manual-mode Coresignal/Crunchbase/LinkedIn-style metadata hints when direct keys are absent. |
| evidence-completion-repeatability-report.md | June 2 diagnostic comparison of safe weekly runs against the final source-yield target. |
| runtime-ledger.json | Run budget, source health, source access, and paid-search spend summary. |
| review-worthy-sanity-check.md | Human click-check of the 8 Review-Worthy companies before partner review. |
| run-manifest.json | The pointer to the one blessed source run. |
What it does not do yet
It does not replace judgment
It accelerates judgment by surfacing evidence, gaps, and next actions. Partners still decide what deserves a meeting or deeper diligence.
It does not write to Attio
CRM integration is read-only for now. Future Slack or Attio writeback can be added later, but the current product is deliberately conservative.
It does not treat LLM guesses as evidence
The agent-native research workbench can suggest possible companies to verify, but those leads stay out of the canonical radar until a real source supports them.