Entrepreneurship.

The framework

1. 01

   The people question is a question about evidence, not credentials.

   Sahlman's version is four short questions — who are they, what do they know, who do they know, how well are they known — and a job title answers none of them. What the room wants is a record that touches this specific problem. The half most founders skip is the gap: say plainly where the team is thin, then show what you've already done about it — the hire you made, the advisor you signed, the work you're still carrying. A team that names its weakness and has moved on it reads as candid. A team with a flawless founding story reads as unexamined, and diligence finds the gap anyway.

2. 02

   Size the opportunity as a business, not as a market.

   The market number is the easiest slide to make and the least believed. What carries weight is the shape of the business underneath it — who buys, how often, what it costs to win one of them, how long before that customer has paid you back, and how much cash the thing swallows before it returns any. Sahlman's objection to five-year projections is that nobody, including you, knows them. So show instead the small number of assumptions the whole model hangs on, and what you've already done to test each one.

3. 03

   The context page nobody writes.

   Context is everything the business must live inside and nobody at the table controls: interest rates, the funding climate, regulation, input costs, the behaviour of an incumbent ten times your size. This is scenario planning done for somebody else's benefit and marked by them, so keep it to three forces. Name each one, say what its moving would do to your numbers, then say what you'd actually do in response — cut the price, slow the hiring, refinance, change the channel. A named response is what turns a list of risks into evidence you've thought past the plan you're pitching.

4. 04

   The deal is the price of the other three.

   The four aren't independent sections, they're read against each other, and the deal is where that reading gets priced. Strong people with a modest opportunity, or a good opportunity in a hostile context, tend to get funded on harder terms rather than not funded at all — more preference, more staging, more control. So when terms come back worse than you expected, the useful question isn't whether the investor is being greedy. It's which of the other three they've quietly marked down. Ask them directly. The answer tells you what to fix before the next conversation.