Work Method Foundry Field Notes About Edge Brief

The Portfolio Screen · for operating partners, independent sponsors, and family offices

The Portfolio Screen.

Every operating problem in every company you hold, surfaced by agents, ranked with your operators, and validated into a short list of funded builds and spinout candidates — with the whole opportunity library becoming IP the fund owns. It is the hundred-problem exercise your team never has time to run, running continuously.

Read the portfolio thesis →

Where this comes from

I used to run this exercise with a room.

In my venture-studio years, the most valuable week of any fund relationship looked like this: surface a hundred problems across the portfolio, put the operators in a room to vote and rank them, generate hundreds of candidate solutions, and emerge weeks later with twenty to fifty ideas worth validating. The output was always worth it, and the cost meant it happened once per fund cycle, if it happened at all.

The Portfolio Screen is that exercise with the cost structure removed. My agents run the surfacing, the solution generation, and the market collision continuously; your operators keep the one part that should stay human, which is the voting. What used to take a quarter and a room now arrives in six weeks, and then it never stops running.

What you receive

The engine’s output, in five deliverables.

Every deliverable ends in something you can act on or own. Nothing in this list is a deck about doing the work, and the base rates that govern the venture math are stated in writing, the same way they are stated everywhere on this site.

The Problem Ledger100+ operating problems surfaced across every portfolio company, each scored for recoverable profit and cross-portfolio prevalence.
The operator sessionThe one human day: your CEOs and operating team vote and rank the ledger, the way my old practice did it — because conviction you voted for is conviction you fund.
The Opportunity Matrix, fund-scaleEvery validated finding plotted — profit against prevalence — with the added-value and best-response tests from Field Notes 01 and 03 applied to the leaders.
Three recommended buildsEach with a pre-registered number, a cost, and the company it starts in. Every build pays for itself whether or not a venture ever follows.
Spinout candidates + design-partner mapWhich problems qualify for the second harvest, and which sister companies form the pre-assembled design-partner ring.
The library, transferredEvery ranked problem and killed solution, with its reasoning — proprietary IP the fund owns, compounding into the next quarter and the next deal’s diligence.

The shape of the search

Wide first, then converge. The engine runs it continuously.

How it runs

Six weeks to the map. Continuous after that.

01

The data rooms · weeks 1–2

Each portfolio company deposits requested operating data into its own secure, access-logged room, under NDAs that keep every company’s data sealed from its siblings. The agents read everything and surface the ledger.

02

The engine · weeks 2–4

Solution generation runs wide — the forced-distance protocol from Field Note 04 — then every candidate collides with live market data and the added-value test. The engine does in days what the workshops did in weeks.

03

The operator session · week 5

One day with your operators and me is enough. The ledger gets voted and ranked by the people who live with the problems, which is the part no agent should ever replace.

04

The map · week 6 yours to keep

The fund receives the matrix, the three recommended builds with pre-registered numbers, the spinout candidates, and the library. What you do next is your call, and the screen’s fee is credited if we build.

What it costs, and why

$25,000.
Credited in full against the first build.

Across an eight-company portfolio that is about three thousand dollars per company for a diligence-grade read of every operating problem the fund holds — and if we fund even one build, the screen was free. The number is set the way everything here is priced: high enough that we both take the exercise seriously, and structured so you cannot lose the fee.

Portfolio Screens · · one per quarter · Q3 open

The thesis behind it →