My premise

Three weeks into due diligence, your pitch deck, financial model, and accounting each already tell different stories. By relying on spreadsheet commas and periods, you anchor every decision to something you protected in the past: what persuaded investors, informed the board, or showed employee performance.

Seeing through this means recognizing that decisions accumulate the personal interests of everyone they pass through. What closed your angel round ends up being the most expensive money on your cap table by Series A, and an early developer values his option grant emotionally rather than through the BSM-method. 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.