Defend your project
Build the business case for a project inside an existing company. The 11-step workflow trims to 9 — same revenue, costs, layer profile and TRL, but capital comes from a corporate-WACC + project-risk uplift, funding round is dropped, and the output is a board memo with NPV, IRR, payback and a commoditization risk register, not a cap table.
Project capital — corporate WACC + project risk uplift
Defend mode does not build a CAPM from scratch. You inherit the parent firm's hurdle rate and add a project-specific risk uplift. The effective project WACC is the sum, and the DCF engine uses it directly.
Parent firm's hurdle rate as published in its annual report or set by the CFO. S&P 500 median is around 8-9%. (900.0%)
Premium over corporate WACC in percentage points. 0-2pp for incremental projects, 3-5pp for new product lines, 5-10pp for greenfield / new geography.
Why two inputs instead of the full CAPM build-up
Value mode (founder workflow) builds the WACC from CAPM primitives — risk-free rate, ERP, levered beta, country risk premium, size premium — because the audience is an external investor who will challenge each input.
Defend mode (intrapreneur workflow) targets a board that already has a published or implicit corporate hurdle rate. The relevant question becomes "how much riskier is THIS project than the corporate average" — captured by the uplift. Disagreement on the uplift is the typical decision argument; the build-up is settled long before the steering committee meets.
If you do want to reason about the CAPM primitives anyway, switch the workflow to Value your company on the home page and run the project as a stand-alone firm — Value computes the full CAPM there.