Author
A composite founder diary. Four contractors, one policy bought only to satisfy a customer's insurance rider, and a premium audit that asked for certificates of insurance rather than contracts. What I found reading the California Labor Code.
A composite founder diary. Twenty one Forms I-9, sixteen flagged, and not one unauthorised worker among them. What I learned reading 8 U.S.C. 1324a and its penalty table: the good faith defence runs one way only, and the clock that sets the fine is the one I do not control.
A composite founder diary. At 65K MRR a banking partner asked whether client funds ever touched our balance. Nine days in the statutes turned up a federal felony that says your knowledge is irrelevant, an exemption written for somebody else, and a civil penalty of 10,556 dollars a day that the statute itself prints as 5,000.
A composite founder diary. $58,400 left on an instruction I never gave, and the statute that decides who eats it never once asks whether I was careless. Read end to end from UCC Article 4A at $64K MRR.
A composite founder diary. A contractor invoiced at $26 an hour for three years asked one question, and the number everyone quotes turned out to be the escapable one. Read end to end from the statute at $63K MRR.
A composite founder diary. Our SMS vendor handled every STOP perfectly, and a customer who typed a plain sentence instead was texted again nine days later. What the statute and the regulation actually require, read end to end at $62K MRR.
A composite founder diary. A preservation demand landed 22 days after my 90-day retention rule had already deleted the exact window it asked for. Rule 37(e) has three conjunctive conditions, and most of the panic failed at the first one.
A composite founder diary. I tried to write off $18,470 of stale customer credits and found that Delaware voids the expiry clause I had written myself, that the $50 threshold I relied on governs a letter rather than a liability, and that two states' notice windows never overlap.
A composite founder diary. I sent a $21,600 collection letter and got back a sentence about a certificate I did not hold. California bars an unregistered company from suing on that business while deeming it to consent to being sued. The threshold that decided it was $177,000, not the $757,070 every guide quotes.
A composite founder diary. A customer filed Chapter 11 and their counsel demanded back $8,550 of ordinary subscription payments. The statute prints a $5,000 floor; the operative floor is $8,575. I was twenty-five dollars under a line I did not know existed, and the date that decided it was not mine.
A composite founder diary. A customer's procurement form asked whether we were a high-risk AI system under the EU AI Act. The headline penalty is EUR 35 million or 7% of turnover. Article 99(6) quietly inverts that for small companies, and the exemption I chased turned out to carry its own registration duty.
A composite founder diary. A 190 line fork of an AGPL library, shipped and forgotten for fourteen months, drew a demand for the complete source of a 148,000 line platform. The licence asked for something 779 times smaller, and the letter turned out to be the only route to permanent reinstatement.
