After years working across environmental think tanks, impact investing, and private markets, Logan Yonavjak kept coming to the same realization: Promising companies or company branches weren’t failing because of weak ideas or bad timing—they were failing because of people.
“Why are 9 out of 10 companies failing?” Yonavjak prompted. “Sixty-five percent of them are failing because of people problems.”
That observation led to the creation of Founder Readiness Institute (FRI), a Durham-based startup formed in the spring of 2025 with a mission to bring structure, rigor, and years of psychological research into how founders and leaders are evaluated, particularly in high-stakes innovation environments.
At its core, Founder Readiness Institute uses people analytics to improve innovation outcomes, effectively raising the likelihood that companies succeed and bring about their intended impact.
The startup was co-founded by Yonavjak and Benji Whitehurst, whose academic and research background as a psychologist and data scientist helped enable the team to translate decades of adult development theory into a scalable, AI-enabled assessment tool. This tool is called The Founder Readiness Level℠.
The Founder Readiness Level℠
The Founder Readiness Level uses one-way, open-ended video interviews in which founders respond to standardized prompts over the course of roughly 45 minutes. Founder responses generate transcript data that the platform analyzes using AI trained on organizational psychology and vertical development research.
“It’s kind of like quantitative linguistics,” Yonavjak said. “We are teaching AI how to evaluate someone’s speech and thought patterns, how [character traits or personal constructs] present in a speech pattern, and then mapping that to a pattern that we’ve established and that’s based in research.”
Rather than categorizing people into types, the system evaluates patterns in how founders think and communicate—particularly with respect to feedback, decision-making, and systems thinking.
One key construct the tool measures is coachability, a trait many investors cite as critical but which they cannot necessarily define or quantify.
“Based on these patterns and how you speak, it gives us a proxy of how you’re thinking and internalizing information and making decisions,” Yonavjak said. “And why that’s important is most investors, the most important construct they pointed to is coachability; if somebody is defensive when you give them feedback, it’s going to be a problem for building a company.”
The platform ultimately assesses founders across six core constructs (such as “relational and emotional IQ” and “resilience under fire” to name a few) that research has linked to leadership and organizational outcomes. Based on these assessments, it positions each individual along a growth-oriented scale.
Post assessment
While the initial concept was rooted in early-stage investing, the company quickly realized its technology could be even more impactful post-investment. Today, Founder Readiness Institute positions its assessment as a foundation for coaching, team design, and leadership development, enabling founders and organizations to establish developmental baselines, design targeted coaching roadmaps, identify complementary leadership roles, and anticipate team-level risks before they surface.
FRI focuses on development in two dimensions. Horizontal development builds specific skills and competencies, while vertical development expands a leader’s underlying capacity to navigate complexity, uncertainty, and scale. By pairing both, the company provides an outline for how leaders can evolve into more capable versions of themselves.
FRI offers packages aimed at both investors seeking decision assessment support and founders and coaches aiming to build the best possible versions of themselves (or other leaders).
Yonavjak also touched on how the tool can remove a bit of bias in industries. With FRI’s unbiased assessment, funding decisions, promotions, or team structuring can be more about a person’s ability rather than their credentials.
“[With the tool] we can level the playing field a bit,” Yonavjak said.
Early traction and next steps
Since launching, Founder Readiness Institute has conducted formal assessments with more than two dozen founders, held conversations with over 100 investor and organizational groups, and acquired a few initial clients. The team has also attracted interest from academic institutions interested in validating and expanding the research base behind the platform.
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Startup: Founder Readiness Institute
Co-Founders: Logan Yonavjak (CEO), Benji Whitehurst (CTO)
Founded: 2025
Team size: 2 (+8 contractors)
Location: Durham
Website: founderready.io
Funding: Bootstrapped; raising pre-seed
Looking ahead, FRI is considering a strategic pivot toward more deeply serving corporate entities and post-investment teams. With clients like these, the startup’s tools can support leadership development, reduce risk, and improve performance as organizations scale.
“Short-term goals are getting [the Founder Readiness Level] into the operational systems of decision makers and really help them see this as important infrastructure,” Yonavjak said.
Bigger picture, FRI wants their tool to become mainstream in companies, academia, investment firms, and society at large—constantly pushing people to develop into better versions of themselves.
