On How We Read Companies

A few days ago, I completed my first year at Lendity. It felt like a small milestone, but for some reason, it made me want to stop and write. Maybe because this year felt unusually long, not in a bad way, but in the kind of way that happens when you are constantly learning, questioning, and seeing things for the first time. People often say that a year working around startups feels like five, and I think they are right.

When I joined, I did not expect to spend so much time listening. To founders, to boards, to investors, to my own teammates. At first, most of these conversations seemed very different from one another. Some were about metrics, others about strategy, fundraising, growth, or internal challenges. But after a while, I began noticing a pattern that connects almost all of them.

It is the way we talk about companies.
Or better said, the way we read them.

I have come to realize that, despite everything that has changed in the ecosystem, the way we interpret a company’s story has not evolved at the same speed. The market, the tools, the pace, the structure of teams, even the meaning of growth itself have changed. But we still read companies through the same frameworks that were built a decade ago, frameworks designed for a very specific type of business that made sense in a very different moment.

The Lens We Still Use

In most conversations, the default way of reading a startup is still the same: the venture capital lens.
It is the one that expects exponential growth, that defines success as hyper-scaling, and that assumes that if a company is not flying, it must be failing.

That logic built an entire generation of startups, but it also built an unspoken standard for how we evaluate them. And I think we have not updated that standard enough.

Today, there are many companies that do not fit that model. They are not unicorns, but they are far from fragile. They generate steady revenue, run lean, adapt fast, and create real value. Yet when we interpret them through the old logic, they look "slow," "small," or "not ambitious enough."

It is not that these companies lack potential. It is that we are still reading them with a story that no longer belongs to this moment in time.

The Disconnect Between Numbers and Story

At Lendity, we have now analyzed over 150 tech companies, and we see this pattern repeatedly.
We run an internal assessment, we look at the data, we study the structure, and when we present the results, founders are often surprised.

Not because they disagree with the numbers, but because the story they had in their heads does not fully match what the numbers are telling. There is a gap between what founders see from the inside, what boards read from the outside, and what the data actually says.

And it is in that gap where the real misalignment happens.

It is not a problem of intelligence or competence. It is a problem of perspective. Founders live their companies from within the storm, so their reading is emotional and intuitive. Investors, on the other hand, read them through models that are designed for pattern recognition. Somewhere in the middle, the story loses coherence.

That is when the narrative breaks. And when the narrative breaks, trust follows.