Methodology · v2.7

FVQFounder Visibility

Tier-1 founder / current CEO press + keynote count for {legal_name} in the last 12 months. INCLUDE: (a) tier-1 publications where the founder/CEO is the named subject or bylined author (HBR, Forbes, Time, Fortune, NYT, WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, The Economist, Wired feature, MIT Sloan, McKinsey Quarterly); (b) named keynote / fireside chat slots at major events (company-hosted developer / enterprise keynotes — typical pattern: an annual flagship developer / partner / customer conference hosted on the company's own brand — count those; plus tier-1 external events such as Davos, Sun Valley, Allen & Co, CES, Code Conference, DealBook, industry-specific tier-1 events); (c) podcast appearances on tier-1 shows (Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Decoder by Nilay Patel, Acquired, Dwarkesh, The Daily, Hard Fork, Stratechery, NYT Daily, etc.); (d) earnings-call / investor-day prepared remarks (count the quarterly earnings call keynote when the CEO is the named speaker). EXCLUDE: ghostwritten content marketing, panel discussions without verified keynote slot, third-party-authored "CEO said" news quoting. Count distinct documented appearances and cite a URL per item. For widely-covered CEOs of mega-cap public companies, expect ≥4 such appearances within any 12-month window — a count of 0 is almost certainly an under-search and the LLM MUST retry with broader queries before emitting 0. Return exact_numerical{value: <appearance_count_12mo>, unit: "appearances", source_urls: [...]}. Server applies ratio_band (0→20, 1-3→50, 4-10→75, 11+→90).