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The SOSX book series
The Ecosystem Bet
For investors and the businesses they back
Written for angels, venture investors, corporate-venture teams, and the founders they back. It accompanies SOSX Investment.
A companion to Seeing the Whole System, applied to a decision that concentrates more judgement into fewer pages than almost any other: the decision to back a business.
It is written for angels, venture investors, corporate-venture teams and the assessors of grants and loans, and, just as deliberately, for founders who want to see their own business the way a good investor will. The opening premise is that the deck is not the business. Moats are balancing loops working in your favour; growth stories are reinforcing loops, and every loop eventually meets its limit; red flags are structure, not vibes, and the memo reads better when it is written that way.
The shape is the series' shape: structure first, then practice, then the machine. Part II is the arithmetic an investment case owes the deal (payback, NPV, IRR and whole life; what would have to stay true, and the switching values that answer it; ranges rather than points; a declared risk posture; whether more evidence is worth buying before you buy it; and the value of waiting) alongside red flags read as structure and the memo written systemically. Part III reaches the machine last: what it does, and SOSX Investment: the data room in, the ecosystem mapped, prospects, moat and sensitivity to disruption and dependencies analysed, and scheduled monitoring after you invest.
It is a book about structure, not stock tips: it is explicitly not investment advice, and it says so. It stands on its own; you do not need the central book first, though the two are better together.
Inside the book
Part I, The investable system
Chapters 1–8. A venture is a system inside an ecosystem: moats as balancing loops working in your favour, growth stories as reinforcing loops that every limit eventually meets, the stocks the deck hides, concentration and keystone dependencies, why markets tip suddenly, timing as a systems property, and the iceberg beneath the metrics.
Part II, The practice
Chapters 9–23. Map the target's ecosystem in a day; screening deal flow, and what a screen should and shouldn't decide; stress-testing the growth story; the arithmetic of a return, payback, NPV, IRR and whole life; what would have to stay true, and the switching values that answer it; ranges rather than points; declaring your risk posture; whether more evidence is worth buying; the value of waiting; the left-field pivots the founder hasn't seen; the portfolio as a system; red flags as structure; writing the memo systemically; reading your own business like an investor first; and the ways this goes wrong.
Part III, The machine
Chapters 24–28. The six steps retold for a diligence question; grounded research, where provenance matters most around money; what-if propagation for scenario stress; what the machine carries method by method; and SOSX Investment: the data room in, the ecosystem mapped, prospects, moat and sensitivity to disruption and dependencies analysed, then scheduled monitoring after you invest.
Part IV, One spine, many domains
Chapter 29. The same discipline, everywhere else: the survey that connects this book back to the rest of the series.
Plus a glossary and further reading in the appendices.
From the series’ shared figure library, the same illustrations you’ll find in the book.
And for the whole argument in one place, start with the central book: SOSX: Seeing the Whole System.