FIELD NOTES
Lessons From Bad Structures
Today’s Observation
Comfort is expensive.
A lot of bad structures start right there.
Small decisions that feel easier in the moment.
Things you tell yourself you’ll clean up later.
Confidence vs structure.
Confidence gets people into deals.
Structure is what keeps them alive when things tighten.
The deals I don’t talk about
are the ones that did the real teaching.
Nobody stands up and walks through the ones that went sideways.
No highlight reels for misalignment.
No panels about the capital stack that stopped working.
But that’s where you learn.
Building when it stops being fun
is where the truth shows up.
When timelines slip.
When cash gets tighter than expected.
When calls don’t get returned as fast.
That’s when you find out what you actually built.
What most people misunderstand about risk
is that it rarely looks dramatic.
It’s quiet.
It shows up in thin margins.
Bad incentives.
People who were great when things were easy.
Bad structures don’t collapse all at once.
They erode.
A decision here.
A concession there.
One wrong assumption that nobody revisits.
Then one day you realize you don’t have options anymore.
That’s the real cost.
Not just money.
Control.
Time.
Leverage.
Room to breathe.
Once you’ve been inside that,
you stop looking at deals the same way.
You care less about upside.
More about what holds when things get tight.
Because upside is easy to sell.
Durability isn’t.
But durability is what lets you stay standing
long enough for anything to compound.
-Michael
End of Field Report.
More intelligence at Outside The Wire.
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The deals that get done rarely look like the deals people talk about online.
Structures change. Markets shift. Opportunity moves quietly.
That’s what these notes are about.
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