Before the check is written

When a partner brings a deal to the IC meeting, they don't walk in with a feeling.

They walk in with a document.

That document has a structure. It covers the same ground every time: how revenue is growing and what is driving it, whether customers are staying or churning through, what the unit economics look like at different cohort ages, how long the cash lasts.

The analysis is not a black box. It starts from the same files you already have.

Growth accounting

Your P&L shows total revenue. An analyst running growth accounting breaks that number into five components: new revenue from first-time customers, expansion from existing ones, resurrection of customers who previously churned, contraction, and pure churn.

These can produce identical top-line growth rates and describe completely different businesses.

A company whose growth is led by resurrection is running a different operation than one led by new logos. Same chart. Different story. The breakdown makes it visible.

Cohort retention

Your retention headline might show 85%. Cohort curves, rebuilt from your transaction data, show whether that number is a floor or still declining. Whether customers have found a permanent reason to stay or are still winding down at a slower rate.

The shape of the curve matters as much as the number. A curve that flattens tells one story. A curve that keeps declining, slowly, with no stabilization, tells another.

Unit economics

Your LTV/CAC ratio might look strong. The analyst checks whether recent cohorts support it, or whether the headline is held up by early months when acquisition spend was near zero. A ratio built on months when S&M was $0 does not describe the economics of the business today.

The reconciliation between the headline metric and the cohort-level data is one of the first places a careful underwriter looks.

What this means

None of this analysis is inaccessible. The inputs are your income statement, your balance sheet, and your raw transaction export.

The asymmetry is not that the analysis is hard. It is that it usually only runs on one side of the table.

Levian runs it before you walk in.