# How the founder-resource list works This is the rubric behind the standalone founder-resource tier list. It is a second ladder, and it exists because the first one is right about something useless. [The impact ladder](tiers.md) asks how far a thing could move the world, and it is correct to crush the resource shelf. Ruling 5 says so out loud: an enabler is ranked on the difference it made, which is nearly always a small acceleration of work that had other routes. So 249 resource pages and 13 helper pages sit at D and F, in one undifferentiated heap, and a founder reading that list learns nothing — not because the letters are wrong, but because they are answers to a question the founder didn't ask. The founder is asking something else: **where should a busy, entry-level Utah entrepreneur start?** The ranking estimates the counterfactual change in a typical founder's outcome, roughly `chance the resource helps × size of the help`. Chance matters most: a spectacular program for one founder in a hundred should not outrank competent help that most new founders can actually use. ## The question this list asks **If a typical new Utah founder uses this, how much more likely are they to build a successful business, and how much larger could that success become?** The reference founder is busy, inexperienced, not yet well connected, and building the ordinary mix of Utah businesses rather than an unusually fundable biotech, defense, or university spinout. This is a population-level recommendation, not a claim that everyone is average. Founders with a specific industry, identity, location, institution, or financing need should use the linked [resource index](../views/resources.md) and each page's fit notes. If you're just browsing, the letters mean: | | | |---|---| | **S** | usually changes the trajectory of a typical new founder; almost nobody can make that claim | | **A** | the best general first move: easy to reach and likely to improve an important decision | | **B** | broadly useful with a good chance of producing a meaningful next step | | **C** | useful when the need fits, but the typical founder may get little or nothing | | **D** | narrow, low-leverage, or hard to turn into an outcome for a new founder | | **F** | a listing. A directory entry, a ribbon cutting, a membership, a page with a phone number | | **unranked** | aimed at founders, too thin to say what it hands you | | **n/a** | not a founder resource. A hospital, a school, a crisis line. Excluded from the list, not judged by it | A few things that trip people up: - **A low letter is not an insult and F is not a synonym for bad.** A county chamber does the job a county chamber exists to do. F says the job is small and twenty other organizations do it, not that anyone is failing at it. The letter changes what you read first, nothing else. - **`n/a` is a real answer, not a hedge.** Utah Medicaid, a children's hospital, and an after-school orchestra are all `Type: resource` in this wiki, because "resource" here means grants, facilities, and programs — not "things for founders." Ranking a pediatric hospital on whether it helps you raise a seed round would be a category error, and marking it F would be a slander. It gets `n/a` and leaves the list. - **This is not the impact ladder with different words.** The two disagree on purpose, in both directions. Utah FORGE is A on impact and `n/a` here — it is a field laboratory, not something a founder can walk into. Utah APEX Accelerator is D on impact and B here, because free help winning a federal contract is worth a quarter of a founder's attention and displaces almost nothing in the world. Neither letter is wrong. - **No order inside a letter**, same as the impact list. That's as fine as the judgment gets. - **No hype bump.** The impact list has a `*` for pages that are disproportionately worth reading. This one doesn't, because a founder's week is not spent on delightful reading. Charm is not a service. Expected shape, as a warning rather than a quota: S empty or nearly so, A in the low single digits, B under 10, and the great mass at D and F. If that inverts, the rubric has drifted toward flattery. The rest of this page is for people assigning a letter. ## The calls that actually decide placements Each was settled against a real page. 1. **Rank what it hands you, not what it convenes.** Money, bench time, a signed contract, a specific professional's hours, a legal waiver, a certification — those are handed to you and you leave with them. "Connections, mentorship, and resources" is convened, and convening is nearly free to supply. Almost every page on this shelf claims the second thing. The tell is arithmetic: a page whose *What It Provides* is a list of nouns with no number, no deadline, and no named counterparty is telling you it belongs at F, whatever its budget is. Altitude Lab names 20,000 square feet, an $80,000 fellowship, and a $100,000–$250,000 fund. Nineteen chambers name a directory and a luncheon. 2. **Expected outcome decides everything above D.** Estimate both the chance that the reference founder qualifies, follows through, and receives useful help, and the size of the resulting change. Weight the first term more heavily because failed routing costs a busy beginner scarce attention. Substitutability still matters, but uniqueness cannot rescue a program almost nobody can use. 3. **A capital source you cannot apply to is a lead, not a resource.** A venture fund hands a founder money if it picks them, and nothing at all if it doesn't — and you cannot make it pick you by filling in a form. What the *page* hands you is the knowledge that the fund exists and invests at your stage, which is worth a morning of research: C for the established Utah funds actually deploying at scale, D for the rest. This is not a judgment on the firms, several of which are the most consequential capital in the state. It is a statement about what a founder can *do* on a Tuesday. Contrast the Utah Small Business Credit Initiative, which is B: there is a lender, a published structure, and a decision you can go get. 4. **Face value is heavily discounted by whether you'll actually get it.** A competitive award ranks between its face value and nothing, never at face value. Eligibility, selection, completion, and timing all reduce expected value. A smaller intervention that reliably prevents a beginner's next mistake can outrank life-changing money that almost every applicant misses. 5. **Rank the reference founder, then preserve the escape hatches.** A narrow program can be decisive for its best-fit audience and still sit below a broad first stop on this list. That is not a verdict on the specialist. Every entry links to its page, and the list links to the unranked resource index, so a biotech founder, rural operator, veteran, university inventor, or Spanish-preferring founder can route by fit instead of pretending to be the median. 6. **Cost is a term, not a demerit.** Equity is a price, an hourly rate is a price, and "free" is sometimes the most expensive option in wasted quarters. A program that takes 6% is not automatically below one that takes nothing; compare what you leave with. What *does* cap a letter is an unpublished price, because a resource you cannot budget for is one you cannot plan around. 7. **A resource you can't reach isn't a resource.** A dead domain, an unanswered contact form, a program whose last verified cohort was two years ago — these are `unranked`, not F. F means the thing works and the thing is small. `unranked` means nobody can tell what the thing is. Several pages here exist only because a state directory listed an organization that has since gone quiet, and a directory entry outlives the organization it describes. 8. **A letter is not a verdict on whether the page should exist.** Same as impact ruling 7. The wiki answers "who do I call in Cedar City," and F is the correct letter for a correct answer. ## Where the letters disagree with the impact ladder The disagreement is the point, so it's worth naming the pattern rather than treating each case as an exception. The impact ladder rewards *displacement* — what would not have happened otherwise, measured against the world. This one rewards *leverage* — what a specific person gets, measured against their afternoon. Things that convene a lot of people and change little (summits, associations, chambers) score low on both. Things that quietly hand one founder something decisive (a sandbox waiver, a bench, a proposal edit) score low on impact and high here. Things that are enormous but unreachable (a national lab, a university, a public company's Utah campus) score high on impact and `n/a` here. ## How this hooks into the rest of the wiki - `**Founder-tier:**` carries the letter. It applies to `Type: resource` and `Type: helper` pages only — the founder shelf. Ventures, people, and historical work take the impact `**Tier:**` and nothing here. - The two attributes are independent and both required where they apply. A page can be D and B. - `## What It Provides` (resources) and `## Who They Help` (helpers) are where ruling 1 gets tested, so a letter of B or above needs one of them to be non-empty. Lint enforces it. - The standalone list is generated from the attribute like every other view. Never hand-edit it. ## Where the letters came from First assigned across the whole founder shelf on 2026-08-13 — 262 resource and helper pages in one pass, rated against this file from each page's *Summary*, *What It Provides* / *Who They Help*, *Best Fits*, and *Cost*, then applied centrally by `scripts/apply-founder-tiers.mjs` from `research/founder-tier-list/results/`. Ratings live in TSVs and are never written to `wiki/pages/` by hand, for the reason given at the top of that script: concurrent edits to the corpus have destroyed sourced work before, and a rating is cheap to redo while a clobbered citation is not. The pass surfaced eight cases where one program is described by two or three pages — Nucleus Grow and Utah Innovation Center, the Nucleus Fund and the Utah Innovation Fund, two Utah Small Business Credit Initiative pages, three 1 Million Cups chapters, three Atwood Innovation Plaza pages, two SLCC Mill pages, and two pairs of southeastern and central Utah councils of government. Those are page defects, not rating defects; they are recorded in `research/founder-tier-list/duplicates.md` and get the same letter until someone merges them. When two raters disagree, that's a gap in this document, and the fix goes here rather than into the pages.