Public data tool helps founders choose and grow startups wisely
From Ideas to Actions: A Public-Data Decision-Support Toolchain Across the Venture Lifecycle
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
Starting and growing a company is hard because founders must decide what ideas to pursue and how to operate after. The authors designed a decision-support tool using public data to help with these choices, analyzing company proposals and investor actions. Their tool identifies which business paths lead to steady profits or high-risk growth and highlights the importance of product and customer progress over just fundraising. They also provide an open dataset and tools to verify and build on their findings.
What this means in practice
- •For startup founders: Use public data tools to assess idea viability and match business actions with growth goals before and after founding.
- •For venture capital firms: Analyze investor-company event histories from public sources to better understand which investments align with strategic outcomes.
Authors
Lei Qu
Abstract
Founders face two linked decisions: whether to pursue an idea before founding, and which operating actions and capital partners fit afterward. We present a public-data decision-support toolchain combining time-bounded proposal profiling, market and moat checks, and deterministic aggregation with auditable investor-company event chains for retrospective analysis. Pre-founding: (a) After threshold selection on 198 development companies, the frozen pipeline achieves F0.5=0.5357 [0.412, 0.655] on an independent, row-disjoint 198-company validation sample. On the combined 396 rows, the Full Pipeline scores 0.6301 versus 0.2734 for a paired Raw LLM baseline. Post-stratification of 1,027 completed cases in a separate scale cohort yields 0.6506 [0.598, 0.707]; the run remains incomplete. A 377-row composition-matched check yields 0.6573. (b) The AI-inference study identifies distribution-layer businesses as a replicable path to independent profitability with a limited revenue ceiling, and frontier-model ownership as a path to capital-market upside at exceptional capital cost. Post-founding: (a) Public sources support auditable event-chain analysis. (b) In the chip-company study, sustained product, customer, and supply-chain progress is associated with better observed outcomes; financing alone does not establish operating progress. (c) Financing comprises 79% of confirmed visible post-investment actions. Evidence tentatively favors acquisition-experienced strategic corporate investors for acquisition-oriented founders and financing-led institutional VCs with fewer observed control events for independence-oriented founders. Findings are developmental and observational, not causal guarantees or investment advice. We release shared ontology, provenance-bearing EventChain data, schemas, benchmarks, and executable skills for audit, reuse, and extension.