Clean diligence pack · no restructuring at term sheet
Sameer Qureshi
Founder, Linkpath AI · Series A, 2026
“We went into diligence expecting to spend three weeks cleaning up. The lead investor's counsel asked one follow-up and moved on. That's the bar we wrote the pack to.”
- Diligence items flagged
- 1
- Contracts rewritten pre-round
- 28
- ESOP pool set at
- 8%
Where he was
Sameer came into the course six months before raising. Pre-seed was clean, but the cap table had accumulated the usual startup barnacles — unclear ESOP terms, a founders' agreement signed in year one that didn't match current equity, and IP assignment letters missing for two early engineers.
The course pulled each of these to the surface in the first three weeks.
What got fixed
We rewrote the founders' agreement with a clean vesting schedule and back-dated IP assignment chains that counsel signed off on. The ESOP pool was restructured from an unclear grant pattern to a standard 4-year vest with 1-year cliff.
Eight weeks later he went into diligence with a single-page diligence index and 28 rewritten contracts. The lead investor's counsel flagged only one item — a minor notice provision — and closed.
Now
Series A closed. Quarterly review retainer continues. The founders' agreement has been boring since — which is the point.
Other outcomes worth reading.
“I'd been self-studying for eighteen months. The first real unlock was the error-log — seeing that 40% of my losses were in two topic clusters I hadn't even noticed.”
“The Mains answer-writing loop was the part that changed me. Three evaluated answers a week, returned within 48 hours — you watch your own prose sharpen over forty weeks.”
“My mocks had a plateau I couldn't shake. The 1:1 mentor pushed me off it in three weeks — not by teaching more content, by changing how I read the passage.”
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