You’re evaluating an earth observation investment. The company operates a SAR constellation, sells data subscriptions to government and commercial customers, and is raising a Series B at a $400M valuation. Your partners want a view on whether the operating model can scale.
So you book an expert call through GLG or AlphaSights. You get 45 minutes with someone who worked in the sector five years ago, whose name you’ll never know, and whose incentive is to sound knowledgeable enough to get re-booked. The call is useful. You learn some things. You hang up and you’re exactly where you started: with a collection of opinions and no structural diagnosis.
This isn’t a criticism of the experts. Most of them are genuinely knowledgeable. The problem is structural: the expert network model is optimised for volume and speed, not for the kind of analysis that determines whether your investment thesis holds.
What the model actually delivers
An expert network call gives you access to someone who has domain familiarity. They can answer your questions, confirm or challenge your assumptions, and share anecdotes from their experience. That’s valuable for orientation: getting smart on a sector you’re new to, validating that a technology does what the company claims, checking whether a go-to-market motion makes sense.
Where it falls apart is precisely where EO investments get complicated.
Earth observation companies are hybrid operating models: hardware manufacturing, software development, government contracting, and commercial sales, all running simultaneously inside a single organisation. The structural tensions between those four modes are what determine whether the company scales or stalls. A 45-minute anonymous call doesn’t surface those tensions. It can’t. The expert doesn’t know your specific deal, doesn’t see the company’s internal operating structure, and has no accountability for the quality of their assessment.
You get a data point. What you need is a diagnosis.
What a structural diagnosis looks like
A diagnosis starts from a different question. Not “is this market attractive?” or “does the technology work?” but “can this organisation structurally deliver on the investment thesis?”
That question requires understanding how the company actually operates, not how the pitch deck says it operates. It requires recognising the specific structural patterns that repeat across EO companies at predictable inflection points: the founder leadership transition at commercial scale, the defence revenue dependency that masks commercial market absence, the accumulated organisational complexity from constellation build phase that becomes permanent dysfunction.
I built €20M ARR in climate adaptation products at ICEYE. I’ve been inside an EO company at exactly the inflection point where these structural patterns emerge. I’ve seen what the pitch deck says and what the operating reality looks like.
The gap between the pitch deck and the operating reality is where investment returns go to die.
A structural assessment takes days, not months. It produces a written diagnostic with specific findings, not a conversation you have to reconstruct from notes. And it comes from a named advisor with accountability for the quality of the analysis.
The structural difference
This isn’t about “better experts.” The experts on GLG and AlphaSights are often excellent. The problem is what the model is designed to produce.
Expert network calls are designed to produce: access to domain familiarity, at speed, at scale, anonymously, without a deliverable, without follow-up, without accountability. The network’s incentive is to match you with someone plausible quickly and bill the hour.
Structural advisory is designed to produce: a specific diagnosis of the organisational and operating model risks in the company you’re evaluating, with a written deliverable, from someone who has been inside this exact type of company, with full accountability for the analysis.
These are different products for different stages of your process. Expert calls are useful for early orientation. They’re inadequate for the operating model assessment that determines whether your investment thesis holds.
When to use which
Use an expert network when you’re getting oriented on a new sector, validating a specific technical claim, or doing a quick check on market dynamics. The model works well for those use cases. It was designed for them.
Use structural advisory when you’re past orientation and into evaluation. When you need to understand whether the operating model can scale, whether the founder can make the leadership transition, whether the organisation’s decision architecture can support the commercial motion the thesis requires. When the question isn’t “is this sector interesting?” but “will this specific company deliver?”
If you’re spending $150K+ in expert network fees per year on EO sector calls, and your portfolio still has companies that are underperforming for reasons nobody on the board can name, the model is giving you data without diagnosis.
What I cover
I work with PE firms, venture capital, and family offices evaluating earth observation and climate tech investments.
Pre-investment structural assessment. A compressed-timeline diagnosis of the organisational and operating model risks in a target company. Written deliverable. Typically completed in 3-5 days.
Portfolio company diagnosis. When a portfolio company is underperforming and the board can’t name why. The market is there, the technology works, the team is talented. Something is structurally broken and standard board-level advice isn’t fixing it.
Sector structural briefing. Deeper than an expert call, with a written diagnostic. Not a market sizing exercise; a structural analysis of where value creation actually happens and where the organisational complexity sits.
Operating model evaluation. Specific to EO: can this hybrid hardware-software-government-commercial operating model sustain the growth trajectory the financial model assumes? Where are the structural breaking points?
The most expensive diagnosis is the one you didn’t do.