Somebody on our team just read through about a thousand LinkedIn profiles looking for job titles that didn't exist a couple of years ago.

Sounds like a miserable afternoon. It's also one of the better free research methods I've come across, and you can run a small version of it yourself.

Why titles are a signal

A company creates a new role when a problem gets big enough that somebody has to own it full time.

That happens before the category has a name. Before the conference track, before the funding announcements, before anyone writes the "rise of" piece about it.

By the time you read that a category is hot, the hiring happened eighteen months earlier. The job posts were sitting there in public the whole time.

Job posts tell the truth

A company's website or press release tells you what they want you to believe. Their job posts tell you what they're actually doing.

The tools listed are the tools they use. The team the role reports into tells you the org structure. What the role gets measured on tells you what leadership cares about this quarter.

None of that is in the pitch deck.

How to run this yourself

Pick twenty companies. Ones you'd want to invest in, ones you already have a small position in, or ones that are just a couple of years ahead of the stage you invest at.

Read their open roles. It's maybe twenty minutes.

Note the roles that look new. Not "senior engineer," but the ones where you find yourself thinking, “what even is that?”

When the same unfamiliar title turns up at five companies that have nothing to do with each other, something is forming. That's your signal.

Two things to watch for

Titles lag too. Plenty of "new" roles are old jobs with fresh branding.

Big companies also invent titles for internal political reasons that mean nothing outside the building. That's why the cross-company check matters. One company doing it is noise. Five unrelated ones is a pattern.

What it's worth to a $5k check

You're not going to out-research a fund with an analyst team. You don't need to.

What you need is a reason to look at a category before it's obvious, because that's the only time your $5k gets into a round at a price that can have an outsized outcome.

Reading job posts won't tell you which company wins. It'll tell you where to start paying attention, and for an angel that's usually the harder half.

There's a second benefit that's less obvious. When you know what roles a company is trying to fill, you know how to be useful to them. That's a much better opening than "let me know if I can help."

We'll share what our research turned up once it's finished. But you don't need our report to start doing this.