Why this matters
Founders do not put every development in an investor email
Updates arrive monthly or quarterly at best. Meanwhile, a company may quietly:
- launch or retire a product;
- announce a customer, partnership, distribution deal, or geographic expansion;
- change pricing, positioning, leadership, or its legal entity name;
- accelerate or freeze hiring;
- publish a technical breakthrough or receive regulatory clearance;
- suffer an outage, recall, security incident, lawsuit, or wave of customer complaints;
- appear in a podcast, local newspaper, trade publication, or founder essay;
- be named in a government award, patent, filing, or public procurement record;
- receive several pieces of coverage that together reveal more than any one article.
The feature should avoid pretending that public activity is the company's complete truth. Public silence is not necessarily bad, hiring counts are not headcount, a website change is not confirmed strategy, and a founder post is not independent validation. Its value comes from making these distinctions visible.
It starts with a watch profile
A living profile, not just a company name
Names are ambiguous, brands change, and founders often post through personal accounts. The investor confirms or edits what PostMoney should watch.
What the investor confirms
- Canonical company name, aliases, former names, abbreviations, product names, and distinctive phrases.
- Primary domain, historical domains, app-store listings, status page, documentation site, help center, careers page, newsroom, and blog.
- RSS/Atom feeds, newsletters, press-release feeds, podcast, and YouTube channel.
- Official X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, GitHub, Product Hunt, Reddit, and other relevant accounts.
- Founders, executives, board members, and official spokespersons, with personal sites and public handles.
- Legal entity names, jurisdictions, company numbers, CIK, LEI, patent assignees, trademarks, and regulatory product identifiers where relevant.
- Known subsidiaries, parent companies, acquired brands, and closely related entities.
- Negative keywords and known namesakes.
- Languages, countries, and source types worth following.
- Investor-specific importance, notification threshold, and muted topics.
PostMoney could propose this profile from the company domain and existing portfolio data, then ask the user to approve uncertain identities. User-curated URLs and identifiers outrank inferred matches.
Every source could show one of four labels: "verified by your team," "linked from the company site," "matched by PostMoney," or "unconfirmed."
The profile is itself useful
It becomes the portfolio's shared directory of official company and founder presences, including dead or renamed properties that would otherwise be forgotten.
Seven layers to watch
What could be monitored
From the highest-confidence layer, the company's own publishing, to evidence that appears on somebody else's property.
1. The company's own publishing
Newsroom and press releases, blog, changelog and release notes, status page, careers page, pricing and packaging, legal pages, team and leadership pages, and the sitemaps and feeds that reveal new pages before the navigation does.
Feeds first. Where none exists, "watch this page" with a readable before/after diff, not a report that arbitrary HTML changed. Web archives serve as baseline and backstop.
2. Founders and executives
Personal blogs and newsletters, social accounts, podcast appearances and guest essays, talks and demos, GitHub projects and papers. Separate posts by a founder from posts mentioning a founder and from posts about the company.
Default: company-relevant posts only, with following all public professional posts as an explicit option. Platform access is uneven, and LinkedIn is constrained.
3. News and web mentions
National, local, trade, and vertical press; wires and syndication partners; customer, supplier, and partner newsrooms; event and award pages; corrections, follow-ups, and retractions.
Cluster ten rewrites of the same press release into one event, led by the original company announcement. "Fourteen articles" is reach, not fourteen developments.
4. Corporate and regulatory records
Incorporations and legal-name changes, SEC filings, patents and trademarks, approvals and recalls, government contracts and grants, clinical-trial registrations, court dockets. Unusually high value, low noise.
Never summarized as guilt, failure, or clinical meaning: show the exact filing type, jurisdiction, parties, status, and source record. With a prominent "not legal or medical advice" boundary.
5. Product and technology activity
GitHub releases, package registries, API docs and changelogs, status incidents, mobile-app releases and ratings, marketplace listings, Product Hunt launches, domains and certificates, public demos and benchmarks.
App reviews illustrate the consent boundary: official review APIs cover the developer's own apps. No universal public API should be assumed.
6. Hiring and organizational signals
New and removed openings; roles by function, seniority, and geography; first hire in a country; clusters such as enterprise sales or regulatory affairs; leadership-page changes; repeated reposting, hiring freezes, or a careers page going dark.
Interpretation stays cautious: removal can mean filled, canceled, or moved, and job boards lag internal plans. An opening is intent, not a hire.
7. Customers, reputation, and ecosystem
A customer case study or procurement notice naming the company; an integration added to a marketplace; a partner certification; a university paper or conference agenda; reviews and support discussions; a security researcher's disclosure; a customer announcing migration to or away from the product.
Corroboration and source quality first: a named customer announcement on the customer's own domain beats an anonymous forum claim. Preserve the posts; never convert sentiment into fact.
One development, many observations
The core object is a company event, not an article
One real-world development can have many observations. PostMoney merges them into a single event and keeps every observation inspectable.
Company event: Acme launches clinician CRM ├─ Acme newsroom announcement (first party) ├─ Founder LinkedIn post (first party / personal) ├─ Product Hunt listing (platform) ├─ Healthcare IT News article (independent coverage) ├─ Three syndicated copies (duplicates) └─ Pricing page diff adding an enterprise plan (observed change)
Possible event types: product launch, product change, pricing, customer win, partnership, fundraising, M&A, leadership, hiring, expansion, award, press mention, founder publication, regulatory milestone, government award, patent, legal event, security issue, outage, recall, reputation trend, and correction.
What every company event carries
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Title and summary | A human-readable title and a short "why it matters" summary. |
| Dates | Event date, first-seen date, last-updated date, and freshness or latency. |
| Type and materiality | Event type, materiality, and sentiment or risk direction only when supportable. |
| Status | First-party, independent, public-record, community, or inferred. |
| Supporting observations | Every observation with publisher, author, URL, publication timestamp, retrieval timestamp, and excerpt. |
| Entity match | Entity-match confidence and the evidence for the match. |
| Event confidence | What is confirmed versus what is inferred. |
| State | Correction, retraction, superseded, duplicate, disputed, or stale. |
| Relationships | Links to a founder, product, customer, location, round, metric, prior company update, report, and follow-up task. |
| User feedback | Relevant, not relevant, wrong company, duplicate, or mute source. |
An investor should be able to open the evidence, see the page diff or quoted passage, and understand exactly how PostMoney reached the summary. The summary is a navigation aid, not a replacement for the source.
The experience
What the investor actually sees
Company Pulse at the top of the page
A compact pulse in three sections: Company says, Others report, and Observed changes, so provenance is legible at a glance.
It answers: what happened since the last founder update, what is genuinely new since I last looked, is there anything to congratulate, ask about, help with, or watch, and which sources have gone stale. Provenance at a glance.
A unified timeline with a strong source boundary
Visually distinct lanes: founder and investor updates with extracted internal facts; verified first-party public announcements; independent coverage and public records; inferred web, hiring, product, or reputation signals.
A "since last update" mode compares the founder's narrative with public developments in the same period, without implying a contradiction merely because something was omitted. External events never masquerade as founder-supplied data.
Alerts that deserve interruption
Immediate alerts for a small set of material event types, a daily "new since yesterday" rollup, a weekly company brief, a Monday portfolio radar across all companies, and quiet collection for everything else.
"High confidence: the FDA posted a recall matching Acme's product identifier." "Acme announced a new channel partnership; four publications repeated the release." "Possible namesake match: an article mentions 'Acme Health' in Toronto. Review before adding." Follow a launch, CEO search, or incident temporarily, then stop.
Digests that synthesize
Top developments and why they may matter, momentum and risk themes supported by event clusters, questions for the next founder call, helpful actions, source coverage and blind spots, and a short appendix of everything collected.
"Brief me on Acme since our last call" combines external events with PostMoney's internal updates, metrics, tasks, and prior discussion. Every external claim cited, private versus public labeled.
Human curation
Confirm official accounts and legal identifiers, merge or split events, correct an entity match, promote an event to "portfolio milestone," add context such as "we knew about this; not a risk," suppress a source, topic, or namesake, create a follow-up, request a watch on a newly discovered URL.
See and undo what automation changed. The monitor improves for the organization without silently changing the company's shared identity.
Reports and portfolio review
Add an event to a memo or LP report as a sourced milestone that keeps its original source link, event date, and provenance even if the wording is edited.
Portfolio-wide: which companies launched products this quarter, which had press or regulatory milestones, where hiring is expanding or contracting, which had no public or private update in 90 days, which externally observed events are not yet reflected in a founder update. Questions the deal team could not answer before.
Where PostMoney is different
Not a scraper with more pages
The durable advantage is not the number of pages PostMoney can scrape. It is the investor-specific, evidence-backed chronology that connects external developments to everything the team already knows about the portfolio company: updates, metrics, Desk questions, reports, and follow-up work.
Under the hood
Inputs, object model, caveats
Inputs
- Feeds and site metadata: RSS, Atom, WebSub, sitemaps, JSON-LD Article and JobPosting markup.
- Selected-page diffing for pricing, team, partners, and legal pages.
- Broad discovery: Google Alerts as forwarded input, NewsAPI, Event Registry, GDELT.
- Public ATS endpoints: Greenhouse, Lever.
- Registries: SEC EDGAR, Companies House, PatentsView, USAspending, openFDA.
- Developer ecosystems: GitHub, Product Hunt, Statuspage.
- Social: X (paid), Bluesky (public), Mastodon, YouTube, Podcast Index.
- Web archives: Common Crawl, Wayback CDX.
Object model
- A watch profile per company.
- An observation: one item from one source, with retrieval metadata.
- A company event, built from many observations.
- Entity confidence, claim confidence, and materiality kept separate.
- A correction as a first-class event that propagates to alerts, summaries, and report drafts.
- Source health: last checked, last succeeded, last item, authorization state.
Caveats
- LinkedIn member-post access is closed and vetted; a LinkedIn gap says "not connected."
- App review APIs cover only the authenticated developer's apps.
- Social API terms, quotas, and costs are volatile.
- Article text often cannot be redistributed; links and snippets may be all the license permits.
- Robots and terms must be respected; a site blocking crawlers remains a gap, never a reason to evade.
- Deleted posts are marked deleted, not silently vanished.