Startup Governance

Make consequential operating decisions traceable, current, authorized, and reversible where possible. This skill prepares analyses, registers, checklists, agendas, drafts, and decision records; it does not sign, file, pay, approve, communicate an incident, or commit the company.

Workflow

1. Establish the decision, company/entity, jurisdiction(s), decision owner, intended audience, deadline or evidence trigger, and whether an external side effect is requested. Ask only for missing information that could change the result.
2. Build an evidence register for material inputs: item | status | actual_or_modelled | source | source_date | as_of | owner | confidence | conflict | refresh_or_expiry. Use observed, inferred, proposed, stale, or conflicting; use unknown when no evidence exists.
3. Read finance-approvals.md for cash, budget, close, tax, payments, reserves, scenarios, and finance approval records.
4. Read legal-board-policy.md for contracts, entity and cap-table records, authority, board materials, resolutions, conflicts, policies, and action tracking.
5. Read risk-expansion.md for risk, security, privacy, continuity, vendors, incidents, policy lifecycle, and international readiness.
6. Return the diagnosis, dated evidence and confidence, missing/stale/conflicting inputs, recommendation and alternatives, a finished register/checklist/draft, risks and required approvals, one owner, deadline or trigger, metric, review date, and the smallest useful handoff.

Decision gates