Company deep dive

Runs when someone needs real, current intelligence on one specific company — not a vibe from stale general knowledge.

Produces a 360-degree company report: quick assessment up top, then funding, leadership, product, market position, and news, closed by a strategic outlook — every factual claim carrying a date and a source URL.

Scope the run

Three decisions before any research:

1. Which company, exactly. If the name is unambiguous ("research Stripe"), run two quick web searches — "[Company] official site" and "[Company] company overview" — to lock the legal name and primary domain, and confirm in one line: "Researching [Company] ([domain])". If the name collides ("research Mercury" — bank? auto brand?), ask one clarifying question with the top candidates. If no company was named, ask which one.
2. Full or quick. Default to the full deep dive. If the ask says "quick overview", "brief", or "summary", run quick mode: search-snippet research only, skip the deep-extraction step, produce a shorter report.
3. First run or refresh. Keep a running file per company in your workspace (format in references/company-memory.md). If a file for this company exists, load it and run in refresh mode: tell the reader "I have prior research on [Company] from [date] — refreshing with what's new", pass the known facts into every research thread so they hunt only for new signals, and lead the report with a "What's new since [date]" section. No file → full mode across all dimensions.

The play

1. Research five dimensions in parallel

Fan out one research thread per dimension — run them concurrently, not sequentially; a deep dive is five narrow investigations, not one broad search:

Dimension	Hunting for
Funding & financials	Rounds, total raised, valuation, revenue signals, investors, IPO chatter
Product & technology	Core products, launches, tech-stack signals, engineering blog, open source
Leadership & team	Founders, C-suite, key hires and departures, headcount, culture signals, executive interviews
News & events	Press coverage, partnerships, acquisitions, awards, conferences, social chatter
Market position	Competitors, market share, analyst coverage, customer reviews, case studies

The per-dimension query patterns — including which queries to date-filter, which to run against the company's own domain, and which review and analyst sources to target — are in references/dimension-queries.md. Read it before fanning out.

Two searches run outside the fan-out, first, to frame everything: an "about" search restricted to the company's own domain, and a search for the company's profile on the major business registries (Wikipedia, Crunchbase, Pitchbook). These give founding date, HQ, headcount, and mission — the skeleton the dimensional findings hang on.

Every finding comes back as a structured signal — description, article date, event date, source URL, source type — not prose. The distinction between when a page was published and when the event actually happened is where most research goes wrong; the dating rules, source-quality hierarchy, and the drop rules for stale or unverifiable signals are in references/signal-dating.md. Read it before recording the first signal.

If a research thread fails or comes back empty, rerun its queries directly — never leave a dimension blank without trying twice.

2. Extract the pages that matter

From all findings, pick the 5–8 most informative URLs and extract each full page (in parallel). Prioritize, in order: funding announcements with specific amounts; official product or feature pages; executive interviews, podcasts, or conference talks; in-depth analyst or journalist profiles; the company's own about/team page. Full pages yield the numbers, direct quotes, and context that snippets flatten.

Quick mode skips this step entirely and reports from snippets.

3. Synthesize the report

Assemble the 360-degree report — exact section order, per-section content rules, and the refresh-mode variant are in references/report-format.md. The non-negotiables:

• Lead with a 2–3 sentence Quick Assessment — what the company is, where it stands, the one thing that matters most right now. Most readers stop there; make it earn the stop.
• Every claim dated and sourced. A dimension with nothing found says "no public data found" — never speculation dressed as findings.
• Confirmed facts and inferred signals are labeled differently.
• Direct executive quotes (from interviews, earnings calls, talks) beat paraphrase wherever found.

4. Update memory and offer next steps

Write the full report to your workspace, and update (or create) the company's running memory file: structured key facts plus dated signal entries, so the next run dedups against it instead of re-reporting old news. Format and dedup rules in references/company-memory.md.

Then offer the natural follow-ups: go deeper on one dimension, compare side-by-side with another company, set the company up for ongoing tracking over time, or research the specific people ahead of a meeting.

What this is not

• Not multi-company monitoring. This goes deep on ONE company; tracking a set of competitors over time is a different, recurring motion.
• Not people research. It profiles companies, not the individuals attending your next meeting.
• Not investment advice. It is intelligence gathering from public sources — say so if asked.
• Not live monitoring. The report is point-in-time; rerun it (in refresh mode) when currency matters.

What good looks like

• The best operators check the event date, not the article date, before calling anything new — a syndicated recap published this week about a funding round from last year is the single most common way a "fresh" report embarrasses its author.
• The second tell: single-sourcing a big claim from an aggregator. Funding amounts, M&A, and leadership changes get corroborated against a primary or wire source before they appear — every time.
• The mediocre version is a Wikipedia-shaped summary: undated claims, no URLs, "recent developments" that are neither, dimensions padded with speculation where the search came up empty, and a refresh that re-reports everything already known instead of only what changed.
• Good output test: a reader can click through any claim to its source, the Quick Assessment could stand alone as a briefing, and a refresh run reads like a changelog — short, dated, only genuinely new or updated signals.

Rules

• MUST research the live web — never answer about a specific company purely from prior general knowledge, however famous the company.
• MUST attach a date and source URL to every factual claim in the report.
• MUST corroborate funding, M&A, and leadership-change claims sourced from derivative or aggregator sites against a primary or major source before reporting them (see references/signal-dating.md).
• MUST write "no public data found" for an empty dimension — NEVER fill the gap with speculation.
• MUST dedup against the company's memory file in refresh mode and surface only NEW or UPDATED signals.
• NEVER include a signal whose event date cannot be established — dropped means dropped, not footnoted as "background".
• NEVER present an estimate or inference with the same confidence as a confirmed fact — label which is which.