How it works

VenturePressure is a structural assessment for founding teams: what your team is built to do, where it's exposed, and what each exposure would take to fix. Not a personality test — a decision-pressure instrument, built for the specific, documented ways founding teams break.

What it measures

Every founder runs two systems, and the instrument measures them separately. Capability — twelve elements of machinery: reading markets, modelling trajectories, finding failure modes, building structure and story, protecting people and standards. Drive — twelve elements of pressure: toward ownership, control, rank, belonging, novelty, security. Twenty-four elements per founder, and — the finding no conventional tool produces — absence: the elements quiet across your whole team, each mapped to the class of failure it exposes you to.

The process

1. One email. Team size, stage, one line on what prompted it. You get a straight answer on fit within one working day.
2. Each founder gets a private link. Explicit consent first — what's collected, who sees what, your rights — then the assessment: 96 statements, swipe format, about eight minutes, on your phone. First responses, not considered positions.
3. Deterministic scoring. Responses are scored by a fixed, versioned algorithm — not machine learning, not a black box. Every score is reproducible and inspectable, with built-in signal-quality checks.
4. The team readings. Individual profiles, then the overlay: coverage, concentrations (two founders pronounced on the same drive — conquest pairing or collision, depending on territory), absences, and the wealth-versus-control geometry per founder.
5. The report, hand-reviewed. Findings are generated from explicit rules, then reviewed, judged, and authored by the practitioner. Delivery is mechanically blocked until review is complete. Every finding ships with its evidence, mechanism, likely surfacing event, and addressable action.
6. The debrief. Forty-five minutes, your team, the map on the table. This is where it stops being interesting and starts being useful.

What it will never do

Predict your failure. Score your worth. Rank one founder above another. Be used to select, exclude, or fire anyone — that boundary is contractual. It maps structural exposure; you decide what to do about it. Respondents see no scores on screen: readings only make sense assembled, and they're delivered with a human explaining them.

Where AI is — and isn't

Scoring: no AI, ever — fixed rules only. Report drafting: AI assists in turning the computed findings into prose, working from the structured findings alone, with names pseudonymised before any external processing. Every report is reviewed and authored by the practitioner before a client sees it, and every report says so.