What Ukrainian founders actually disclose — and the one field almost nobody fills in

The completion curve

Every company file on our catalogue has the same fields available. Which ones get filled in, and which get skipped, is a measurement of what founders think matters — and it is remarkably consistent.

The curve falls off a cliff between "things about the company as it is" and "things that require the founder to make a claim they could be held to".

Nobody files traction. Nobody.

This is the finding that made us stop and check the query twice. Not one founder has filled in the structured traction field — not the ones with real revenue, not the ones with thousands of users.

It is worth being careful about what that means. It does not mean these companies have no traction. Several of them plainly do; we have seen the dashboards on calls. It means that when a founder is asked to write a number into a box that will be published next to their name, they do not.

From talking to founders, three reasons come up repeatedly. The number is small and they are embarrassed by it. The number moves and they are afraid of publishing something that will be wrong in a month. Or they genuinely do not know which number the reader wants, so they pick none.

All three are fixable, and two of them are our fault rather than theirs — a field labelled "traction metrics" with an empty box under it is an invitation to freeze. We are rebuilding it as specific prompts with a stated unit and an as-of date. If a founder can write "1,400 paying users, 4 August" instead of composing a paragraph, we expect that zero to move.

The 21% problem statement

Fourteen founders out of 66 have written down the problem their company solves. Four in five have not.

This one is more surprising than the traction gap, because a problem statement costs nothing and carries no risk. It is not a number anyone can hold you to. It is two sentences.

Our read is that founders skip it because it feels obvious to them. When you have spent three years on a problem, restating it feels like padding. To a reader encountering the company cold — which is every reader — it is the single most load-bearing field in the file. Skip it and the reader has a company name, a sector tag and a funding ask, and no idea why any of it should exist.

If you are a founder reading this and you file one thing this week, file the problem statement. It is the highest-return two sentences in the whole record.

Why an investor should care about a blank field

A blank field is not neutral. It is information about where the diligence cost sits.

If 79% of files have no problem statement and none have traction, then the first two calls with any company on this market are spent extracting things that could have been written down. Multiply that across a shortlist of thirty and the reason funds skip small markets stops being about risk appetite. It is about hours.

That is the gap we are trying to close, and publishing the completion rates honestly — including the zero — seemed a better way to start than claiming the files are more complete than they are.