Every program admits on instinct. Greenlight gives you evidence - on the idea and on the founder - before the cohort begins.
Founder-market fit is how founding teams get evaluated before there is any product. We turn it into a structured, per-applicant read.
Each founder in your pipeline runs a ten-minute Reality Check answering the three questions every admission hinges on - is the market there, is this the founder and team to serve it, and what happened to founders who tried ideas like this before?
The Market Scan covers the market side: what customers already pay for and what that says about problem priority, timing and trend direction, and who controls access to the customer - each rated plainly.
The Founder-Market Fit read covers the founder side across five advisory dimensions - each co-founder read individually, then one team read. Hover to see what each one asks:
Hindsight Intelligence covers the history: a disciplined premortem plus a record of more than 10,000 documented founder outcomes, each tied to a public source - what actually happened on this path, and why.
One clear, shareable report per founder - printable, comparable across your pipeline, three questions answered with evidence behind each.
The read runs through two accelerator lenses: knowledge bases built from the published thinking of Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz, every claim cited (we're not affiliated with Y Combinator or Andreessen Horowitz). Built from 1,696 videos and 535 articles, distilled into 13,858 sourced findings. Run a Reality Check with them to see what your founders would see with your lens beside them - we can build yours the same way: your methodology, per program, confidential to you. A design-partner conversation; bring it when we talk.
Every Reality Check adds to a structured dataset we are actively building: the ideas founders brought, the founder profiles behind them, and how each read landed against a record of more than 10,000 documented founder outcomes. Most of what exists about founder-market fit was written by people who won. Our record includes the founders the market turned down. That is the more instructive half.
Unlike a model or a methodology, that record - what real markets rejected, and why, and who was building it - is not something that can be easily replicated. It grows with every Reality Check. The programs that work with us at this stage help shape what gets captured and how the read is structured. That is a real advantage - for them and for us.
Reach out if you're an incubator, accelerator, or VC firm exploring partnership opportunities. We'd love to hear from you.