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Company Battlecards

On DeckKnow who to contact, what to say, and when to move

On Deck

Know who to contact, what to say, and when to move

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Company Battlecards — Issue 11 | On Deck

Disposition Rules

Five States, No Sixth

Hiring managers came back Tuesday. Posting clusters that went dormant in August are refreshing across your target list. Every company in your active queue now sits in exactly one of five execution states, and each state has one prescribed action. If you find yourself doing something other than that action, you've drifted.

The five states: Send now. Resolve one gating fact. Build one bounded proof patch. Hold until a named trigger. Close. That's it. There is no "research" state. Research is only the method inside Resolve, scoped to the single fact you named before you started. The moment you're reading Glassdoor reviews for a company you already scored Act, you've left Resolve and entered procrastination.

The rubric verdict and the execution state are independent variables. A company can score Act on the rubric and sit at Hold in execution because the hiring manager hasn't started yet. Mixing them up is the most common way to waste a Tuesday night.

When you're missing a proof artifact, the question is timing. If building the missing piece takes longer than the opportunity will stay open, send with what you have. The Trust essay and three Agentic Labs demos are linkable today. A forward-looking artifact still in the build queue is something you raise in conversation, not something you cite in a cover letter. ]>

Disposition Rules

Five States, No Sixth

TAKE NOTE

Send now — Signal is live, route is reachable, at least one proof object survives the first screen. Draft the message tonight, send at 9:30 AM. Not "soon."

Resolve one gating fact — One named unknown blocks commitment. Identify who can answer it. Contact them. Stop when answered.

Build one bounded proof patch — A specific artifact gap would change the hiring decision. Scope it, time-box it at 90 minutes, then re-enter Send now. If the build exceeds the window, send without it.

Hold until named trigger — Opportunity is real but no present action is justified. Write down the trigger and who owns it before you park the account. A hold without a named trigger is research wearing a different label.

Close — Two unanswered follow-ups, or a hard gate (geography, comp floor, disclosure requirement). Redirect the energy.

Evidence timing labels:

Use now — published, linkable (Trust essay, Labs, case studies)
Patch now — buildable before tomorrow's send window
Show live — defensible in conversation, not in writing
Send current — build time exceeds opportunity decay; go with what's published ]>

PART ONE

Two Confirmed Buyers Across Fourteen Targets

OPEN

Fourteen targets swept for a named buyer with a live role. Two cleared: Slack and Capital One. Atlassian's new CPO is worth a probe this week. The other eleven are waiting on a trigger that hasn't fired — a successor hire at Anthropic, a posting at Brex, a design leadership signal at Abridge. Your portfolio's bottleneck is routing: finding the buyer and reaching them. This sweep maps every target by gate type so you know which to act on, which to watch, and which are structurally blocked until something changes.

Two Confirmed Buyers Across Fourteen Targets

PART TWO

How Senior IC Craft Buyers Actually Decide, Tier by Tier

OPEN

Post-Labor Day hiring managers are scanning portfolios this week. The Senior IC Craft Buyer — the design leader hiring for Principal or Staff roles — uses the same vocabulary at every company tier: craft, vision, systems thinking, hands-on. The evaluation logic behind those words is different enough to describe different jobs. This piece decodes what they say versus what they actually screen for at AI-native startups, growth-stage platforms, and enterprise software companies, with the tells that reveal which frame is active and the specific moves that win or lose them — before you know anything about the individual.

How Senior IC Craft Buyers Actually Decide, Tier by Tier

PART THREE

Midjourney's First Design Executive Is Seven Weeks In. Her First External Hire Is Open.

OPEN

Midjourney ran four years and $300 million in revenue without a single design executive. Then in one week last July, it acquired Co-Star, appointed founder Banu Guler as CDO, and posted six product-org roles simultaneously — including the Design Lead who will help her build a design function from scratch. That posting has been open 50 days. This reconstruction sequences every recoverable event, identifies what the pattern reveals about Guler's authority and the role's real scope, and closes with a contact recommendation for this week.