Three ways to start. All of them priced.

That is the ordinary case and it is what the Triage resolves. The memo names one plan and explains why the other does not fit. Our bias is downward: an oversold engagement produces a client who never refers anyone, and referrals are the entire business.

Yes, and it is the most common path. Blueprint’s build specification is Buildout’s input, so nothing is repeated. Blueprint credits in full against Plan B or Plan C begun within ninety days of delivery — you never pay twice for the same discovery.

Then the memo says that, in writing, with the reasoning. You keep the document. Roughly speaking, if we cannot see a path we will not invent one to fill a slot in the calendar.

For Blueprint and Buildout, no — we work alongside internal teams routinely, and the engineering handoff is designed for exactly that. Plan C assumes we are materially inside the company, so it is a conversation about roles before it is a conversation about price.

Yes, in English, on a workable timezone overlap. Entity formation and cap table work under Plan C is US-centric; outside the US we coordinate with your local counsel rather than pretending to be it.

Anything not named in the engagement schedule. Every plan ships with a schedule listing deliverables by name and by acceptance condition, so the boundary is a document rather than a memory. Changes are priced and agreed before the work starts — never discovered on an invoice.

The acceptance condition in the schedule, and your written acceptance against it. If a deliverable does not meet its stated condition, we fix it at our cost. If it does and you want something more, that is a change order.

In Blueprint it is expected — changing your mind is what the month is for. In Buildout it depends on whether the change is direction or foundation. Direction is usually absorbable; foundation is a re-price. We will tell you which one you are proposing on the day you propose it.

The Triage exists to find that before you sign. If it emerges later anyway, we stop, put the finding and a revised price in writing, and you decide whether to continue. We do not spend a budget quietly and present the problem at the end.

Once, for up to sixty days, at a phase boundary. Beyond that the engagement closes and re-opens at current pricing, because holding a team idle is a cost somebody pays.

Involved in every engagement, on the parts where his involvement changes the outcome: the architecture, the judgment calls, the Triage memo, and the client relationship throughout. He is not writing every line of code, and he should not be — the Studio and BailiwickVibe carry their own teams. That is the arrangement you are buying: his judgment, and the people who execute against it.

BailiwickVibe’s engineering team, working with AI pair-programming under human architecture review. Nothing is offshored, nothing is body-shopped, and nobody junior is left unsupervised on your foundation. The tools are modern; the review discipline deliberately is not.

Because the scope, the deliverables and the acceptance conditions are named in writing before anyone starts, and because Michael is in the architecture and the relationship throughout rather than only at the kickoff. We also schedule against real capacity instead of selling past it — if the right start date is weeks out, the Triage tells you that rather than promising Monday.

No. We are not fractional staff and we do not take operating roles or titles inside your company. An engagement is a defined scope with named deliverables and an end date; Plan C adds a board observer or advisor seat, which is a seat, not a job. If what you need is someone in the org chart, you need to hire that person, and we will say so.

Every plan ships an engineering handoff written so another competent team can continue without us. It is a named deliverable with an acceptance condition, not a courtesy. Key-person risk is a thing we remove, not a thing we sell.

You do, on final payment: code, data model, documentation, models, specifications, and the deliverables in full. Assignment is written into the engagement agreement rather than left to be argued about later.

Those remain ours. On payment in full you receive a perpetual license to use anything of ours embedded in your deliverables, for the life of the venture. What you do not receive is the right to resell the method itself as a service.

Never anything client-specific — not your code, your data, your model, your positioning, or your name. Generic engineering patterns and our own internal libraries travel, as they do at every firm; your business does not.

Only where a venture genuinely needs certified, audit-defensible metrics. FohBoh.ai is a separate company in which Bailiwick Ventures holds an interest, so any use of its technology is a related-party arrangement: it is disclosed to you before it is proposed, licensed and priced separately by FohBoh, and never a condition of working with us. If a competing product fits better, we will say so.

Yes, a mutual one, before the Triage. We will not sign non-competes that would bar us from an entire sector, and we will tell you plainly if we are already working in an adjacent space.

In full, against any plan booked within 30 days of the memo’s delivery. One Triage, one credit. There is no clawback, no partial credit, and no small print reducing it.

Blueprint — 60% at signature, 40% on delivery. Buildout — 40% at signature, 30% at architecture sign-off, 30% at deployment acceptance. Venture — staged monthly against named milestones, with the equity documented at the start. Invoices are net 15.

Yes, in writing, at a stage boundary. You pay for work completed to that point, and everything delivered and paid for is yours to keep and to use. There is no termination penalty in either direction and no exit fee.

We do not refund completed work that met its acceptance condition. We do repair, at our own cost, any deliverable that did not. Those are different questions and we treat them differently.

Travel and third-party costs — hosting, licenses, audits, data — are billed at cost with receipts, and anything above $500 is approved by you first. We do not mark up pass-throughs.

Blueprint and Buildout are fixed at signature for the named scope; for that scope, the number on this page is the number on the agreement. Published pricing may change for future engagements, and it never changes retroactively for a signed one.

Because Plan C is us carrying venture risk with you over six to nine months, and a pure-cash price for that work would exceed what almost any founder can pay at this stage. Equity is what makes the cash number reachable. It also means we are wrong at the same time you are.

3–6% of common stock, or advisor warrants where a cap table already exists and issuing common would be disruptive. The exact figure is set by scope and cash mix at the start of the engagement, not negotiated at the end of it.

On a time schedule across the engagement, written into the agreement. There is no acceleration tied to a financing, a sale, or any other transaction — vesting is a function of time served, nothing else. If we stop early, unvested equity does not vest, the same discipline you would apply to a founder.

No, in every form the question can take: no success fee, no finder’s fee, no percentage of proceeds, no warrant tied to a round, no bonus on a close. Bailiwick Ventures is not a broker-dealer and does not place securities. Our compensation is a fixed cash fee for the work plus an equity percentage negotiated before the engagement starts. Both are set before anyone knows what you will raise, and neither changes afterward.

No, and neither can anyone else. We build the strongest honest case for the venture and stand behind it in the room. Whether the market says yes is the market’s decision, and a firm that promises otherwise is describing a service it cannot deliver.

We are not recruiters and we do not staff your company. We will make introductions where we know someone worth knowing, and we will help you think about what a role actually needs before you open it — but the hiring is yours to do and yours to own.

One piece, strongly: hire people you have already worked with. A team assembled from strangers in the weeks before a raise is a diligence problem, not an achievement — investors read it as unproven, and they are usually right. Founders who have shipped something difficult together carry evidence that no résumé provides. Start there, and fill the genuine gaps afterward.

An observer or advisor seat through the raise, if you want one. Not a control position, not a blocking right, and not a permanent fixture — the seat is there to be useful during the period we are inside the business.

Occasionally, and separately. Any investment is a distinct decision on ordinary terms alongside other investors, documented apart from the engagement. Being a client creates no obligation on us to invest, and an investment creates no discount on the work.

The Triage typically within two weeks of payment; the memo within five business days of the session. Plan start depends on the schedule — we will give you a real date at Triage rather than an encouraging one.

A decision-maker who responds inside two business days, access to systems and data on day one rather than week three, and one person empowered to say yes. Those three things account for most of the difference between a plan that lands on schedule and one that does not.

In order: slow client decisions, missing access to data or systems, and changes to the foundation rather than the surface. Technical surprises are a distant fourth, because the Triage and the diagnostic are built to find them early.

Staff augmentation, hourly work, fixed-bid responses to RFPs, taking over management of an existing engineering team, recruiting or placing staff, fractional or interim executive roles, and building anything we would have to be dishonest to sell. Also: engagements that skip the Triage, and free work of any description.