The console serves the ventures
Venture Portfolio
Every venture on one loop — catalyze an idea, refine it, review the real gates, launch it live. The fleet runs the work; you decide only where taste, strategy, or spend genuinely need you.
Decision rights — clint owns technical & the factory · laura owns venture vision · sparking or killing a venture needs both. Each gate is routed to whoever owns that call.
The founder loop
7 execution stages run underneathNeeds you
Genuine gates — options + analysis inside, decided hereVentures
Open one to see its backlog & prioritized queueCatalyze — execution stage: spark
Spark a new venture
Capture the idea while it's hot. The factory grooms it into a one-page thesis and runs a prior-art + feasibility sniff before any spend. You gate the GO.
Venture thesis
Criteria: is the thesis testable? is now the time? · Who decides: clint (GO commits fleet spend)
No chat ping. GO writes ventures/<id> at stage spark, seeds its backlog, and drops it on the portfolio rail — the decision has a home and an artifact.
Review — the gate for Apex · execution: prototype pick
Apex bake-off — pick the direction
Three cutting-edge directions, each in the established night-sky style, each elevating a ranked opportunity from the apex scout brief. All are deployed & cross-family reviewed before you look. You decide on taste and strategy — once, here.
Options
Founder gatelaura decides · visionclint consulted · feasibilityCriteria
Which best serves the holding company's job — signalling a portfolio of ventures — while preserving the night-sky identity and the a11y floor?
Factory recommendation (non-binding)
Direction B — it answers the holding-co's purpose directly and pairs with the console's own new stage/health/backlog model. A is the safe refinement; C is the boldest brand move but carries the most craft-risk.
Direction chosen
This is the anti-chat-ping pattern. Before: these directions get pasted into a pane and decided with one word — rationale lost, no artifact. Here: the options, the factory's honest analysis, and the criteria all live on the surface, and your choice writes ventureDecisions/apex/records/… and advances apex into build.
Supporting view — the engine room
Factory Ops
Today's console lives here now — fleet, spend, board, gates. It's the machinery that runs the ventures, not the front door. Drop in when you want to see the engine; otherwise the portfolio carries the work.
Fleet snapshot
illustrativeReframed, not removed. Every fleet action here is now attributed to a venture's backlog — the ops view is where you watch the machine, the portfolio is where you run the company.
Prototype — a pitch of the Founders Console as a venture catalyst platform. Night-sky tokens inherited from public/console/index.html; illustrative data throughout (live Firestore venture data not wired). Companion design doc: design/_shared/decisions/venture-catalyst-platform.md. Signed in as laura.