Company Deep Dive

The default version of "research a company" — Wikipedia summary, About page skim, last funding round — produces the same brief everyone else walking into that meeting has. The value isn't the facts. The value is interpretation: what a recent hire signals about strategy, what a layoff round means for buying priorities, what the gap between their stated values and their Glassdoor reviews tells you about working with them. That's intelligence. Everything else is just research.

The skill runs the same seven layers regardless of purpose, then weights them differently depending on why you're researching. A sales brief leans hard into recent initiatives, decision-making structure, and buying signals. An interview brief leans into challenges they're facing, leadership style, and red flags to probe. A partnership evaluation leans into stability, cultural compatibility, and the exit terms nobody likes to discuss. Same skill, different emphasis. You say why, the brief reshapes.

Every claim gets a confidence tag — verified (official filings, multiple independent sources), estimated (industry benchmarks or single-source reporting), or speculative (inferred from indirect signals). Most company briefs lie by omission — they present estimates as facts. This one flags the difference because acting confidently on a guessed revenue figure is how deals go sideways. You get to see which numbers to defend in the room and which to caveat.

Two parts most company research never delivers: the SWOT+ that connects every strength and weakness to a strategic implication ("strong brand recognition" is trivia; "strong brand recognition means you'll compete on differentiation, not awareness" is intelligence), and the contradiction hunt — where the company's stated values clash with employee reviews, where growth announcements clash with hiring slowdowns. Contradictions are where the real signal lives. Also included: a Quick Brief 5-minute mode for when the meeting moved up, and a perishability tag so you know which sections to re-verify before a high-stakes use.