The advisor problem: why three opinions don't add up to clarity
If you're considering a $30M acquisition, the move feels obvious. Bring in the M&A attorney, the tax counsel, the operating advisor, the CPA. Get five smart opinions. Triangulate. Decide. Here's why that approach has a structural blind spot.
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The invisible counterparty: what background checks can't tell you
When Shohei Ohtani signed his record-breaking contract with the Dodgers, his interpreter Ippei Mizuhara had been at his side for nearly a decade. Mizuhara had cleared every relevant check the system can perform. By the time the federal indictments came down, he had stolen close to $17 million.
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Why the most expensive decision is the one you can't see
If you ask a sophisticated investor what their worst decision cost them, you tend to get a number that comes back to the same shape. They had two options. Both looked reasonable on the surface. They picked one. The one they picked turned out to contain something they didn't see at the time.
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What we mean by 'decision environment' (and why most diligence misses it)
When operators talk about 'doing their homework' before a major commitment, they almost always mean the same thing. Reading the documents, checking the references, modeling the scenarios. Most of them lack a clear name for what they're missing. Here's the vocabulary.
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Reading the room before you sign: a counterparty diligence framework
If you've ever sat through a counterparty review meeting, you've watched the same conversation play out. What rarely happens in that meeting is anyone asking the right structural question: what category of risk is this process actually capable of detecting?
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Why blind protocol matters more than the method itself
When sophisticated operators evaluate Scientific Remote Viewing for the first time, they tend to ask one of two questions. Both are reasonable. Both miss the more structural one. The structural question is: what makes the data reproducible at all?
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The five questions every principal should ask before a major commitment
Most pre-decision processes spend almost all their time on questions where the answers are knowable through documents. The questions that change outcomes are different. Here are five worth asking before, not after.
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What past sessions reveal about pattern blindness in private capital
If you read enough cases of catastrophic financial fraud against high-net-worth individuals, you start noticing something uncomfortable. The cases don't look like outliers. They look like a pattern. Here are four, side by side.
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