Cold Read

A company cannot hide its plan

It is in what it files, what it hires for, what it ships, what it tells investors, and what happened to companies like it. Cold Read reads those six places at once and writes one note: the answer first, then the evidence, then what it means for you, then the dates that would prove it wrong.

Corporate recordWho owns it, what it bought or sold and for how much, who runs it, how much cash and debt.Securities filings, company registries, deal releases, director changes.

Counterparty or productThe other side of a deal in the same depth, or products, pricing, customers and money.Filings for the other party, pricing pages, app stores, customer counts.

Says versus doesWhat leadership tells investors against what the releases, privacy pages and migrations show.Earnings calls, shareholder letters, privacy and terms pages, archived pages, app listings.

Market and base rateHow outsiders rate it, the regulatory climate, and what happened in five to eight comparable situations.Analyst notes, trade press, regulator enforcement, named comparables.

Infrastructure fingerprintWhich platform serves which brand and how the estates are joined. Passive, read-only, and cited with the command that produced each finding.DNS, certificate transparency, response headers, archived pages, app metadata.

Openings as the planWhat the company is building, where, at what seniority, and what it has stopped hiring for.Applicant-tracking APIs rather than the careers page; aggregator snippets for closed ads.

PeopleWho you will meet, what they have said and written, and a one-line read of what each will test. Runs for interviews only.Team pages, talks, podcasts, books, blogs, repositories, filings. No LinkedIn profile is ever opened.

Four questions it is built for

Invest

What did they pay for, and is it worth it?

Price against what was bought, the earn-out as a signal, the dated calls that settle it.

Join

What would I inherit, and who will I meet?

Stack by chapter, the mandate, questions by round, one-line reads of each person.

Deal

What happens to the acquired company, and was it cheap?

Two deals side by side, the base rate, the cutover window, the surviving roles.

Position

Who wins the market, and what would change it?

The moat as the filings show it, the regulator as the real constraint, three dated events.

What a finished read looks like

Four sample reads, one for each question, each to the fixed layout the skill enforces: numbered sections, a mark on every claim, sources by lane. The full versions ship with the skill and open as PDFs.

Hollowmere and Kerbline: the integration, from the outsideRead on 14 March 2026

Public record only. No LinkedIn profile was opened. 41 footnotes across six lanes. Sample company.

1. The answer in one paragraph

Hollowmere bought Kerbline for its 1,900 courier customers and its carrier integrations, not for its platform. The allocation books the integrations at GBP 12.0m, the technology at GBP 6.1m and the brand at GBP 1.9m cited (FY2025 annual report, note 14)^s1-4. Nine months after close, the pricing page redirects to Hollowmere, the privacy notice names Hollowmere as controller, and a Hollowmere ad describes "bringing two engineering organisations together" cited^{s3-3, s3-5, s6-2}. Five comparable deals absorbed the acquired platform within 24 months cited^{s4-6 to s4-10}. The reading is that the Kerbline platform is absorbed between June 2026 and June 2027, with the customer-facing app last inferred, because the allocation, the ads and the comparables point the same way.

2. The deals, side by side

	Kerbline	Wayfold
Price and structure	GBP 48.0m: 31.0m cash, 17.0m contingent; earn-out up to 25.0m cited^s1-4	GBP 112.5m, 60% in shares cited^s1-7
Purchase price allocation	Integrations 12.0m, technology 6.1m, brand 1.9m, goodwill 23.6m cited^s1-4	Technology 31.0m, brand 9.0m, goodwill 58.0m cited^s1-8
Earn-out status	"Resolved; fixed amounts of GBP 9.2m and GBP 6.8m payable March 2027 and March 2028" cited^s1-5. Fixing eighteen months early at 16.0m against a 25.0m maximum usually means a negotiated settlement inferred	Paid in full cited^s1-4

3b. What it does

Date	What happened	Where it shows	Mark
2025-07-14	Founders dropped from the Kerbline board; two Hollowmere directors appointed	Registry filing	cited^s1-3
2026-01-20	Pricing page redirects to Hollowmere's last-mile page	Archived copy against live	cited^s3-3
2026-02-25	Certificate for app.kerbline.co.uk issued under Hollowmere's account	Certificate log	cited^s5-3

12. Sources by lane (excerpt)

s1-4 Hollowmere FY2025 annual report, note 14 (business combinations). s1-5 H1 2026 interim report, note 9. s3-3 Archived Kerbline pricing page, 19 January 2026. s5-3 Certificate transparency entries for app.kerbline.co.uk, 25 February 2026. s6-2 Engineering Manager, Last Mile, posted 18 February 2026.

Cold ReadOpen the full read as a PDFPage 1 of 11

Platterloop engineering stack by chapter, for the Head of Engineering roleRead on 9 May 2026

Public record only. No LinkedIn profile was opened. 69 footnotes across seven lanes. Sample company.

Platterloop sells ordering, kitchen display and payments to about 2,400 restaurants. One Rails monolith on AWS London with a React front end and a React Native app, plus a newer Go payments service. Job ads since January describe a split of the monolith and a move of reporting to BigQuery inferred.

Ordering chapter

Component	Runs on today	Confidence	Where it is heading
Menu and order API	Rails, Postgres, Sidekiq, from three ads	cited	Extraction to a service; "Go or Kotlin" in two ads inferred
Guest web ordering	Next.js on Vercel, from headers and an ad	cited	Unchanged
Staff mobile app	React Native; last update 2 April 2026, App Store	cited	Monthly releases

What it means for the mandate

Inherits a monolith split that two ads say has started and none says has finished; a payments service that is the revenue bet; a platform team of two with no SRE practice; and a founder CTO moving sideways, which makes the first ninety days about trust with the people who built it. Fourteen open roles make it a hiring role first inferred.

People, one line each

CEO. Will test whether you can talk to restaurant owners, not just engineers. Two podcast episodes on operator pain inferred
CTO. Will test whether you respect what was built; the 2024 post on "boring technology" is the tell cited
VP Product. Will test whether engineering can give dates; a marketplace background means release trains inferred

No LinkedIn profile was opened.

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Lanternglass Learning: price against what was bought, and whether it holdsRead on 3 February 2026

Public record only. No LinkedIn profile was opened. 65 footnotes across seven lanes. Sample company.

Lanternglass's growth since 2023 is two acquisitions, not its own product. It paid 2.1x revenue for a profitable assessment business and 9x for a loss-making tutoring marketplace, and the job boards show it building on the second and running down the first. The three-year case rests on the tutoring margin the CEO has guided to.

	Quizzenby, 2023	Tuttlewick, 2025
Price and structure	GBP 19m cash cited	GBP 135m, 40% in shares, earn-out to 2027 cited
Multiple and profitability	2.1x, profitable cited	9x, loss-making, "breakeven FY2027" cited
Goodwill share of price	48%	81%
What was done with it	Brand retired March 2025 cited	Brand kept; 11 of 23 engineering roles cited

Signals to watch

Date	Event	What to look for
12 March 2026	Full-year results	Tuttlewick segment margin, first disclosure
September 2026	Half-year results	Whether "breakeven FY2027" survives
June 2027	Tuttlewick earn-out ends	Founder exits

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Pedalgrove in e-bike subscriptions: position and what would change itRead on 21 November 2025

Public record only. No LinkedIn profile was opened. 55 footnotes across six lanes. Sample company.

Pedalgrove is second of four by fleet and first by city coverage, and its moat is the repair network, not the bikes: the only intangible it has ever booked is "service partner agreements" cited. The leader is cheaper and bigger but is hiring for a repair network it does not yet have cited.

Operator	Fleet inferred	Cities	Per month	Repair model
Velothane	about 18,000	6	GBP 59	Contracted, building in-house; 12 of 30 open roles cited
Pedalgrove	about 11,000	14	GBP 69	Partner network, 120 shops cited
Spokesmith	about 4,000	3	GBP 79	In-house cited
Rimwarden	about 2,500	2	GBP 49	None stated unknown

Three dated events that would change the ranking

April 2026: grant scheme renewal terms published.
January 2026: Velothane's Series C close, if it names a repair acquisition inferred.
On filing: Pedalgrove's accounts for the first full year of the partner network.

Cold ReadOpen the full read as a PDFPage 1 of 10

Install it in your agent

Pick your agent. Two minutes, no account.

One line, as a plugin. The skill then answers to /cold-read.

/plugin install cold-read --marketplace me2resh/cold-read

Older versions: /plugin marketplace add me2resh/cold-read, then /plugin install cold-read@cold-read. From a shell: claude plugin install cold-read --marketplace me2resh/cold-read. Update later with /plugin update cold-read@cold-read.

Codex reads skills from ~/.codex/skills. The installer copies the folder there.

git clone https://github.com/me2resh/cold-read
cd cold-read
./install.sh codex

Inside a project, AGENTS.md in the repository is also written for Codex: copy its text into your project's AGENTS.md and keep skills/cold-read/ where Codex can read it.

Cursor uses project rules. Copy the rule file into your project; it loads the skill when a task matches.

git clone https://github.com/me2resh/cold-read
mkdir -p .cursor/rules
cp cold-read/.cursor/rules/cold-read.mdc .cursor/rules/
cp -R cold-read/skills/cold-read .cursor/

The rule points at skills/cold-read/SKILL.md; keep the copied folder next to it or adjust the path in the rule.

Copilot reads repository instructions. Copy the instructions file and the skill folder into your project.

git clone https://github.com/me2resh/cold-read
mkdir -p .github
cp cold-read/.github/copilot-instructions.md .github/
cp -R cold-read/skills/cold-read .github/

If your project already has copilot-instructions.md, append the text instead of replacing it.

Any agent that reads a folder with a SKILL.md, or a plain instructions file, can use it.

git clone https://github.com/me2resh/cold-read
cd cold-read
./install.sh /path/to/your/agent/skills

For agents with a single instructions file, paste AGENTS.md into it and keep skills/cold-read/ readable by the agent.

Then ask the way you would ask a colleague.

Cold read Acme Ltd before my interview on Thursday.
Was Acme bought cheap, and what happens to its engineers?
Read Acme's job ads. What are they building next year?
Is Acme a three-year hold? Outside view only.

Six things it will not do

Go behind a login.Filings, registries, press, job ads, public pages and APIs, DNS, certificate logs, archives. No scraping against terms, no pretexts.

State a claim without a mark.Cited and linked, inferred from the record, or unknown after looking. Readers tell research from gossip at a glance.

Open a LinkedIn profile.A profile visit tells the person they are being researched. Snippets, team pages, talks and filings instead.

Quote a hostname before confirming it.DNS and certificate findings are public and go in the note with the command. They show that something exists, not why, so the skill confirms each one from an ad, a page or a filing before it is said to the company.

Mix inside knowledge with the record.If you work there, your facts sit in a marked section. The shareable copy reconstructs from the sources alone.

Leave a reading undated.When each board was pulled and each page read. A reading is only as good as its date.