Research/02
Inside a cognitive profile: the four things we measure
Conviction, clarity, coherence, and the edges of what a founder does not yet know, scored call over call.
A cognitive profile is not a personality type. It is a running model of how a founder thinks, decides, and follows through, built from the conversations they actually have.
Conviction
Not how loudly a founder believes something, but how load-bearing the belief is, and what would have to be true for them to change their mind.
Clarity
The ability to compress a complicated situation into its essential shape without losing the part that actually matters.
Coherence
Whether this week's story is consistent with last month's, and whether the differences are genuine updates or quiet drift.
Four things worth measuring
A cognitive profile is not a personality test. It is a running model of how a founder thinks, decides, and follows through, assembled from the conversations they actually have rather than the answers they select from a list.
The first thing we track is conviction: not how loudly a founder believes something, but how load-bearing the belief is. What would have to be true for them to change their mind? Founders who can answer that question tend to hold their beliefs more usefully than founders who cannot.
The most valuable thing is the boundary
The second axis is clarity, the ability to compress a complicated situation into its essential shape. The third is coherence across time: whether the story a founder tells this week is consistent with the one they told last month, and whether the changes are updates or drift.
The fourth is the most valuable and the hardest to self-report: the edges of what a founder does not yet know. The strongest founders are unusually precise about the boundary of their own understanding. PredInt is built to find that boundary and to watch it move as the company learns.
What you get
- A structured read across four reasoning axes
- A profile that updates every single call
- Signal that compounds instead of resetting
- A clear view of what a founder does not yet know
Questions, answered.
- Is the profile a score?
- It is not a single number that ranks founders. It is a structured picture across several axes, meant to inform judgment, not replace it.
- How is it built?
- From the founder's own conversations over time. Each call adds evidence; the profile sharpens rather than starting over.
- Who can see it?
- The founder, and the people they choose to share it with. It is their record of how they think.