Before the wire. Checking a founder before you invest.
The pitch is the claim. The record is the evidence.
Most of the founders we are asked to check are exactly who they say they are. The ones who are not tend to fail the same four questions, and three of them you can run yourself in an afternoon.
Was the offering lawful to sell me?
Start with the regulator, not the founder. A private offering sold to Washington residents is supposed to be noticed to the Department of Financial Institutions' Securities Division, and anyone selling it for a commission is supposed to be registered. DFI publishes its enforcement orders and lets you verify any adviser, broker or money-transmitter licence; a crypto platform soliciting here without one has already told you something. Check the salesperson on FINRA BrokerCheck and the adviser on the SEC's IAPD. Federal Form D filings sit on SEC EDGAR under the company's name. A missing filing is not always fraud. It is always a question the founder should be able to answer in a sentence, and the answer tells you a great deal.
What happened to the last company?
Search the Secretary of State's Corporations and Charities Filing System by the founder's name as a governor, not by the company you were pitched. Washington makes every entity list its governors on the annual report, and the statute defines the term to include an LLC's members or managers. What you want is the trail: how many entities, how many administratively dissolved for failing to file, how many with a registered agent that changed the month a lawsuit landed. Then the Department of Revenue business lookup, which tells you whether any of them actually traded, and OpenCorporates for the ones formed in other states. A founder with three dissolved companies and a fourth pitch is not disqualified. A founder who did not mention the three is.
Who has sued him, and who already has a claim on the assets?
The King County Superior Court portal, the statewide courts name search and PACER for the Western District will show civil suits, judgments and bankruptcies under the founder's name and each entity's; CourtListener's RECAP archive has many of the federal filings free. Read the complaints, not just the docket line; a dismissed case can still tell you how a founder treats the people he owes. Then UCC filings at the Department of Licensing, which name every lender that has taken collateral and what it is. If the company's receivables, equipment and intellectual property are already pledged, your investment sits behind that lender whatever the term sheet says. Finally the county recorder for liens against the founder personally, including the IRS.
What can't I find on my own?
Three things. Whether the credentials are real: the degree, the exit, the patent, the prior employer, each of which has a registrar who will confirm or deny if you ask correctly. Whether the people who worked with him last time would do it again, which is interview work, and the part of due diligence that finds what no database holds. And the entities formed in Wyoming, Nevada or Delaware, which sell anonymity and need to be unwound from the other end. That is the work funds and family offices retain us for before capital moves, and the report is written so that if the deal goes wrong, counsel can use it.
Wiring money to someone you met six weeks ago?
Send us the founder's name, the company and the deck. We will tell you within two business days what the public record shows, which claims we can verify and which we cannot, and quote a fixed fee for the full report. Funds and family offices: we work under your counsel's privilege when you want it that way.
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