Startup Evidence

Produce decision-ready startup work without turning guesses into facts.

Route the request

1. Identify only the requested deliverable modes:
   • competitor deep dive, price/feature comparison, or battle card: read competitive-intelligence.md
   • positioning, 30-day validation plan, or customer interviews: read positioning-validation.md
   • investor memo, IR deck, or fundraising narrative: read investor-ir.md
   • verification-only request: do not rewrite the artifact unless the user asks for corrections
2. Always read independent-verification.md.
3. Establish the decision frame before research: decision, audience, company and product stage, geography, currency, comparison set, artifact format, and an explicit as of date. Infer only low-risk details and label them.
4. For claims that can change, research current primary sources. Prefer official pricing, product documentation, regulatory filings, customer-authored evidence, and first-party announcements. Use secondary sources only to locate or triangulate primary evidence.
5. Build one shared claim ledger and reuse it across every requested artifact. Do not run separate research passes that silently use different scopes or dates.
6. Draft the requested deliverable, then run the independent verification gate. One correction and recheck is the normal limit; further rounds require a bounded, approved Goal/UW loop.

Keep a claim ledger

Give every decision-relevant claim a stable ID. Record:

Facts need evidence. Inferences need both supporting claim IDs and reasoning. Recommendations need the decision criterion they optimize. Estimates, forecasts, and targets must never be rendered as actual results. Preserve unknown instead of filling a gap with plausible prose.

Apply the independent gate

• Separate producer and verifier contexts. Prefer a fresh read-only subagent that receives the frozen request, artifact, sources, ledger, formulas, and rubric—not the producer's intended verdict or suspected defects.
• If no independent context is available, report self-check only; do not call it independent review.
• Run deterministic checks before judgment: arithmetic, units, currency and billing normalization, repeated-number consistency, required fields, links, citations, and artifact parsing/rendering.
• Use project-native architecture or policy checks when the deliverable includes implementation claims. Add tools such as dependency-cruiser only when the target is appropriate, the tool is already governed or preflighted, and the user authorized any installation. AI agreement is not an architecture test.
• External AI review is optional and advisory. Route it through the governing external-review workflow; never treat invocation as permission to upload private material.
• A verifier may return PASS, PASS_WITH_NOTES, FAIL, or BLOCKED. Do not suppress disagreement or uncertainty to make the result look complete.

Respect boundaries

• Never invent competitor prices or features, customer quotes, traction, market size, conversion, revenue, partnerships, or investor interest.
• Treat contact sales, missing plan details, roadmap items, beta features, and inferred capabilities as distinct states.
• Do not bypass authentication, scrape against access controls, upload private documents, contact customers or investors, publish, update a CRM, spend money, or make financial commitments without explicit authorization through a safe tool path.
• Forecasts and fundraising materials are decision support, not financial or legal advice. Surface material assumptions and recommend qualified review where stakes require it.
• Route .docx IR work through the document skill and presentation/Slides work through the presentation skill so the final artifact is rendered and visually checked.
• Store only sanitized, reusable decisions or workflow lessons in memory. Never store raw interviews, investor lists, private decks, credentials, or full source packets.

Return a complete handoff

Return, in the user's requested language and format:

1. the requested deliverable;
2. a compact claim index or ledger link;
3. the independent verification report and independence status;
4. explicit gaps, contradictions, and stale evidence;
5. the as of date, checks run, and any skipped checks.