STEALTH Notes

Long-form, in the founder's voice.

STEALTH Notes is the founder essay series. The conversational companion to the institutional research at stealth1000.com/research. New issues approximately every two weeks. Free to read.

Biweekly cadence · No paywalls · Citable

Latest · Issue 02

The IRR math, and why the 3.5× premium isn't what you think.

STEALTH Notes
02
"The IRR math, and why the 3.5× premium isn't what you think."
By ALI SINA · JUNE 2026
Latest issue

The IRR math, and why the 3.5× premium isn't what you think.

Several LPs read Issue 01 and wrote me back the same question, in different ways. Is the 3.5× actually real, or is it selection effects? This issue is the longer answer. It is more interesting than the short one. ~1,600 words.

Library

Every issue, in order.

STEALTH Notes launched June 2026 with Issue 01. New issues approximately every two weeks. All issues remain free to read.

Issue 02 June 2026 · ~10 min read

The IRR math, and why the 3.5× premium isn't what you think.

Several LPs read Issue 01 and asked the same question: is the 3.5× actually real, or is it selection effects? The longer answer — including what we honestly think the real number is, and what to model against.

~1,600 wordsRead →
Issue 01 June 2026 · ~8 min read

Six hundred companies later.

The story of how STEALTH stopped running a workshop studio and started running something with no name — until we put one on it. The conversational version of the Manifesto + Annual Report.

~1,600 wordsRead →
Issue 03 · Coming ~July 2026 · TBD

The operating math behind compounding.

How company 300 actually gets cheaper to build than company 30, in dollars and weeks. The mechanism that makes the distributed studio model work at scale.

ForthcomingNotify me →
Companion to

The institutional research.

STEALTH Notes is the conversational layer. The institutional research lives at stealth1000.com/research — the Annual Report, the DSI methodology, the working papers.

Read the Annual Report

The State of the Venture Studio Economy 2026 — 24 pages of institutional research synthesizing GSSN, PitchBook, NVCA, Crunchbase, and CB Insights data. Free, sourced, citable.

Download Annual Report PDF →