Map a startup ecosystem

Context, setup, and planning

Try to understand the decision this map will inform and the market or geography it should cover. Useful context may include:

• the sectors, stages, company types, time period, and geographic boundaries in scope;
• what the user considers an active startup, key investor, accelerator, or notable player;
• the thesis, signals, or examples that reflect the user's taste;
• the intended audience, decision, evidence standard, research depth, and desired artifact.

Approved thesis documents, internal research, CRM records, passed deals, and network or industry context can provide a head start when they exist. They are not prerequisites. Offer to learn the scope through a few questions, inspect relevant approved context, or combine both.

Agree on depth before starting. A broad sweep is lighter and faster; focused parallel research produces richer profiles. Propose a concise plan and confirm it before going wide.

Execution

1. Search broadly for relevant startups, investors, accelerators, and other key players before choosing where to go deep. The web, LinkedIn, Crunchbase or Dealroom, accelerator batches, news, and internal records may be useful when available and approved.
2. Use plain-English searches as well as standard sector categories so companies that do not fit clean industry codes are not missed. When useful, find lookalikes from a company the user already considers relevant.
3. For startups, gather the evidence that matters to the agreed scope. This may include product, team and founder backgrounds, funding and investors, geography, stage, recent news, hiring, launches, partnerships, and other traction or momentum signals.
4. For investors and accelerators, capture their relevant focus, stage, geography, portfolio or cohort evidence, and their relationship to the mapped companies.
5. Keep every fact traceable to a source and date. Distinguish facts from inference, expose contradictions, and flag evidence that is missing, uncertain, or stale.
6. Dedupe against existing CRM records, internal research, and passed companies when that context is available and relevant.
7. Present a small representative sample first—around ten companies can work for an initial VC sourcing map—so the user can correct the scope, taxonomy, evidence bar, and ranking before the full sweep.
8. Expand the accepted approach. If the user wants a ranked shortlist, include a short reason for each fit rather than presenting an unexplained score.

When visual evidence helps the map, save useful founder profile pictures, product screenshots, demo images, or team photos from their original sources.

Suggested outcome

Produce a sourced market map that makes the important companies, investors, accelerators, relationships, funding, and momentum easy to review. Shape it as the brief, table, report, or presentation the user needs; do not force one artifact.

Suggested next steps

If useful, offer to:

• turn the map into a recurring thesis or market-monitoring workflow;
• deepen research on a shortlist, or read strawberry/venture-capital/build-structured-investment-memo-any-company when the user wants investment memos;
• preserve the accepted scope, sources, evidence standard, and output as a user-owned skill.

Never invent missing facts or assume an external action was approved.