My premise

Three weeks into due diligence, your model and your accounting tell different stories. Unit economics in the board deck shows improving NRR, but the customer cube shows churn is increasing with every new cohort. By relying on spreadsheet commas and periods, you anchor every forward-looking decision to a company you're leaving behind, and ignore how execution warps it. Seeing through them is what lets a business operate at the speed of its ambition.

Decisions moving through the company accumulate the personal interests of everyone it passes through. What closed your angel round ends up being the most expensive money on your cap table by Series A, and an early developer without a proper contract might walk away with your idea. This is a result of the structure, not of bad faith: the investor is protecting their milestones, the founder their story, and the employee their job. The company ends up somewhere between all of them, but never as far as it could have gone.

Knowing the protection logic of the people in the room is the precondition for building a structure that none of them can individually distort. But the contracts to align them were written for the company you were: liquidation preferences accumulate into a waterfall that leaves you with nothing, a wavering cofounder without clean vesting becomes a cap table ghost. Investors price both before you do.