Earlier this week, I exported 142 session fragments for SLC Digital’s due diligence team. Not raw video. Not biometrics. Just state vectors—5-layer JSON payloads stripped of identifiers, timestamps, and session hashes. I zipped them, encrypted the file with their public key, and uploaded it to a burner Tresorit link. Then I sat back and realized: this wasn’t a technical request. It was a stress test of my honesty. What I actually learned isn’t about data formats or anonymization pipelines. It’s that investors don’t trust the demo. They trust the gap between what you could show and what you choose not to. Most founders think diligence is about proving sophistication—showing the model card, the accuracy metrics, the pipeline diagrams. But when you’re a solo engineer building browser-based perception with no cloud ML, what they’re really looking for is restraint. They want to see that you know the difference between capability and overclaim.…