POTENTIAOperational Debt: the three-symptom test for a fragile founding team
Operational Debt looks for three specific symptoms: whether the team has irreplaceable single points of failure, whether growth is happening without the margin to support it, and whether the CEO has become a bottleneck that every decision has to pass through.
None of these show up cleanly in a pitch deck's metrics slide. Revenue can be climbing while all three symptoms are quietly getting worse underneath it — which is exactly why the factor exists as a separate check rather than being assumed to correlate with traction.
The value of naming these three specific things, rather than a vague "team execution risk" score, is that they're each independently checkable and independently fixable. A team can address a CEO bottleneck long before it becomes an existential problem — if someone actually names it first.
See how a consent-based check actually works.