The first time I almost called a fundraise wrong, I was looking at a contributor jump on a small fintech org. Five contributors to twelve in eleven days. Clean step function, the kind that shows up in a chart and makes you reach for Slack. I drafted a message to an investor friend — "this team raised, watch for the announcement in the next two weeks" — and then I caught myself. I'd seen the same exact shape fire six times that quarter, and only twice did it actually map to a round. The other four were a hackathon, a Google Summer of Code cohort, an open-source contributor sprint, and a team that committed under personal accounts so a re-org made the count jump. I deleted the message. That was the day I stopped trusting any single GitHub signal. After six months of watching commit traffic across roughly 4,200 startup orgs, I have five patterns I take seriously and one rule that holds them together: no signal fires alone. If I see one, I shrug.…