For investors
You were right about the company. It came apart anyway.
It usually comes apart at the seam between the science, the business, and the people, the join no one owns. Whatever its shape, your capital is one of the forces on that seam. That seam is the one I read.
Three depths, one read
You can read the seam before you write the check, on a portfolio company that's already drifting, or as a standing relationship across the hold. Two weeks, a month, or a few months: the depth changes, the read doesn't.
01 · Assess
Organizational Due Diligence
Your due diligence reads the pitch deck, the cap table, and the CTO's LinkedIn. It doesn't read the decision graph — the layer that actually converts your capital into the outcomes your thesis described.
Structural Due Diligence: A Framework
Financial DD asks: is this a good investment? Technical DD asks: does the technology work? Structural DD asks the question nobody else is asking: can this organisation convert the capital into the outcomes the thesis describes?
People Due Diligence for Deep Tech
Everyone writes financial DD and technical DD. 'People DD' is a sales page term with no framework behind it. The structural assessment evaluates whether the decision graph can convert the capital into the outcomes the thesis describes.
Founder-CEO Assessment
Can this founder scale? The usual assessment is personal — leadership style, coachability, self-awareness. The structural assessment asks whether the organisational design allows the founder to evolve, or traps them in early-stage behaviours regardless of capability.
Climate Tech Operating Models
Climate tech is not SaaS. The operating model assumptions from software investing don't transfer to companies with hardware, regulatory dependencies, and project-based revenue.
Case: The DD That Changed the Deal
A Series B climate adaptation company with strong metrics and validated technology. The structural assessment found something the numbers couldn't show.
Before You Fire the Founder: The Structural Diagnosis You're Skipping
The standard narrative says founders who can't scale need replacing. Structural assessment usually reveals the problem isn't the founder. It's the organisational design around the founder.
Why Senior Hires Leave Before Series B
The hire got the title, compensation, and mandate. They didn't get the authority, information access, or decision rights the role requires. The gap between formal and informal structure is where senior hires fail.
02 · Diagnose
Portfolio Diagnosis
The board sees 'execution problems.' The structural diagnosis sees a decision architecture that routes every product decision through the CTO, creating a six-to-eight-week delay on every release. One is a description. The other is fixable.
Case: The Portfolio Company Nobody Could Fix
A Series A clean energy company with missed targets, two COO departures, and board-level frustration. The problem wasn't the people.
Your COO Hire Failed Because You Diagnosed the Wrong Problem
The pattern: portfolio company struggling, hire a COO, COO burns out within 18 months. The role isn't the problem. The organisational design is.
Why Climate Tech CEOs Get Replaced
The pattern isn't individual. Capella Space, Einride, Array Technologies, Sunrun, ITM Power — each replaced the CEO under different surface-level narratives. The structural mechanism is the same: the operating cadence the company needs outgrew the cadence the founder runs on.
The Climate-Native Founder-to-CEO Transition
HBR owns the generic founder-to-CEO transition. The climate-specific version — where the founder's technical depth is genuinely irreplaceable and the operating model runs four cadences — is uncontested.
03 · Intervene
Post-Investment Support
The check is written. The company is struggling. Board advice isn't working. You've told the founder to fix the org three times. Nothing sticks. That's where structural diagnosis starts.
How Engagements Work
What hiring a structural diagnostician looks like. From a two-week pre-investment assessment to six months of organisational redesign.
04 · Impact
Mission and metrics describe what a company intends. Whether it can deliver either lives in the same seam, between the impact thesis and the operating reality. A reporting framework doesn't reach that layer.
Where Capital Should Flow Based on Physical Science, Not Market Narrative
Market narrative and physical science disagree on where climate capital is needed. The data points to sectors where small capital has outsized impact.
The Structural Diagnostic a Family Office Needs Before Writing a Direct Check
Family office direct investing in climate tech is structurally different from fund investing. Standard financial DD misses the organizational risks that determine whether the company can deliver.
Impact Due Diligence Evaluates the Wrong Layer
Impact frameworks evaluate outputs: carbon reduced, people served, SDGs aligned. They don't evaluate whether the organisation can sustain those outputs.
The Next-Gen Transition Is an Organizational Design Problem
87% of millennial UHNW individuals consider social impact when investing. 30% of their parents do. The content industry frames this as a values conversation. It's an organisational design problem.
The Organizational Failure Modes That Kill Climate Tech Companies
Climate tech carries organizational complexity that SaaS frameworks can't see. The failure modes are structural, predictable, and invisible to standard due diligence.
Family offices
Fewer bets, longer horizons, and a seam you live with for a decade.
A venture fund with thirty portfolio companies absorbs organisational failure as statistics. A family office with five climate tech investments feels each one. The structural assessment gap between financial evaluation and organisational evaluation is where your investment risk concentrates.
Read →The seam is the layer no one prices. If you're about to back a company, or you're holding one that's drifting, write to me. We'll read it together.