Vol. 1
Welcome to The Vesting Table
What This Is
As of January 1, 2026, I have spent roughly five years serving as corporate and transactional counsel to a wide range of startups, emerging companies and established businesses. That feels like a reasonable point to begin writing about what I am seeing, reading, and learning along the way. I intend for The Vesting Table to be occasional, anecdotal, and highly opinionated, shaped by first-hand work and by observation, rather than any claim to long-range authority.
While the focus will remain on early-stage companies and strategic capital, The Vesting Table will not be limited by subject matter. It will reflect whatever I am reading, noticing, or thinking about at a given time (see opinion piece herein).
I am grateful to my amazing friends and family who encouraged me to start writing and to put these thoughts into the open. To everyone who finds themselves here, I extend my sincerest thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts.
Some Additional Foundational Comments
Not every business discussed here will fit a familiar Silicon Valley archetype, or follows the Y Combinator playbook. Not every company is trying to change the world. Many are solving narrow problems in specific niches, often quietly and profitably, without much interest in scale narratives or trend cycles. In fact, many of the stories I am interested in writing are about founders or operators simply trying to build something durable enough to support their families and personal visions.
The language around startups and emerging companies has become fluid. Capital, technology, ideas and ambition now travel easily across geography and industry. The aim here is to steer away from categorical definitions or industry/online trends, and instead notice patterns, ask questions, and surface conversations that sit slightly off the main narrative.
This is just one perspective, five years in, offered as such.
Disclaimer
The Vesting Table is published for general informational and discussion purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, investment, or other professional advice. Nothing herein is intended to create, and no content should be construed as creating, an attorney–client relationship. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any firm, employer, client, or affiliated organization. Some content may have been edited or refined with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools, however the ideas and conclusions expressed remain the author’s own. Readers should not act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information contained herein without seeking appropriate professional advice from qualified legal, financial, or other advisors regarding their specific circumstances.
Looking for Investor Money in 2026: Tasks Before the First Term Sheet
As the data suggests, funding activity in 2025 increased meaningfully from the prior year, with more than $200 billion deployed globally in AI startups alone. At the same time, the mix of who is writing checks has broadened. Large pools of capital that historically sat on the sidelines, including sovereign funds, are now showing up directly in venture rounds, particularly in areas like AI, where tens of billions of dollars moved through the market in a single year.
The fact is simple: there is a lot of money out there, and it now appears from more places than it used to.
With capital moving quickly and coming from more directions at once, the margin for allowable disorganization narrows. In the early stages of engagement, pitched projects are often judged less on potential than on whether an existing business (or developing idea) appears ready to absorb outside partners without friction.
By 2026, most serious capital raises will assume a baseline level of organizational maturity from day 1. When a serious investor engages a young business, there is typically an expectation that the business already holds together internally. The narrative should be coherent. The numbers (good and bad) should be familiar to the founders. Due diligence should function primarily as confirmation rather than discovery.
Before the first term sheet appears in your inbox, it’s important to have clarity around a small set of core business fundamentals:
Coherent Narrative. A clear articulation of the problem being solved, the company’s solution, the target customer, the addressable market, and how the business makes money.
Demonstrable Traction. Evidence of real customer adoption, revenue, or engagement that supports the claim that the product or service is solving a real problem.
Credible Team. An explanation of who is building the company, why they are suited to do so, and how responsibilities are actually divided in practice.
Command of Numbers. A working understanding of customer acquisition costs, lifetime value assumptions, burn rate, runway, and projections, grounded in how the business currently operates rather than aspirational models.
Baseline investor readiness. Pitch materials may open the door, but investors will quickly look past them to how the company is organized underneath. For this reason, early “data room” preparation is highly encouraged.
Once a company moves beyond initial conversations, attention shifts quickly to documentation. Companies preparing for sophisticated capital should know, without searching, where the following materials live and which versions control:
Corporate Records and Capitalization. Formation documents, equity issuances, option grants, and a capitalization table that reconciles cleanly across SAFEs, convertible notes, and preferred equity.
Intellectual Property Ownership. Founder and contractor assignment agreements, invention transfer documentation, and a clear understanding of any open-source exposure.
Material Commercial Agreements. Customer, vendor, and strategic contracts that meaningfully impact revenue, operations, or risk, with key terms understood.
Employment and Consulting Arrangements. Current agreements for key contributors that accurately reflect compensation and roles.
Financial Statements. Financials that reflect how the business is actually run, not only how it was originally modeled.
Debt and Obligations. Outstanding debt, side letters, investor rights, guarantees, or other unusual obligations that affect control or economics.
Bonus Tip: Have a form NDA (and MNDA for joint ventures) ready. While some investors and online gurus will argue that “sophisticated capital doesn’t sign NDAs,” that debate is largely beside the point. The real objective is preparedness. Having an NDA drafted and vetted in advance avoids unnecessary delay, and prevents rushed legal requests.
Random Things I’m Paying Attention To (2026)
Fly Cars: China’s Low-Altitude Economy
Last month I was stunned to learn that China has spent the last several years quietly building a regulatory and physical framework for low-altitude airspace below roughly 1,000 meters. In other words, flying cars. The basic framework includes mapped corridors, municipal coordination, and existing infrastructure integration. As a result, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft are already operating in limited commercial contexts. I think the impressive part of this is not the aircraft itself, but the governance decision to make airspace legible enough for innovating planning and capital deployment. I guess we can reluctantly say that similar efforts are underway in the US, including pilot programs in California, but they remain fragmented and experimental, lacking the unified airspace, zoning, and municipal coordination framework that China has already operationalized at scale. Long ways to go.
Anti-Technology Innovation: Example, The Fig Phone
The Fig Phone is a deliberately constrained mobile device built to do almost nothing beyond calling and texting, positioned as a response to attention extraction rather than a technical leap forward. I was introduced to it in the lobby of my allergist’s office a few weeks back as I noticed the patient next to me flipping open a phone in 2025. The innovation of the phone lies in refusing optimization, proactively avoiding infinite scroll, and app ecosystems entirely reframing “progress” as user control rather than capability. I have casually spoken to a wide range of consumers about this, and it seems that people are beginning to value distraction subtraction more than features, especially when it comes to their phones. For founders, it is a reminder that innovation can come from recognizing a self-created problem, rather than advancing the stack.
Software Loans and Capital Pullback
Lenders have begun reducing exposure to software-backed lending structures as generative AI destabilizes assumptions around recurring revenue durability and long-term margin predictability. Particularly, loan models built on steady subscription cash flows now face uncertainty as AI compresses pricing power, accelerates competition, and shortens product lifecycle. Capital is becoming more selective where AI introduces rapid revenue volatility.
H-1B Visa Changes and Hiring Global Talent in 2026
To address inefficiencies in the imported labor market, beginning in 2026, the U.S. is moving to a weighted H-1B selection system that favors higher-paid and higher-skilled applicants rather than pure lottery outcomes. This materially affects companies that rely on international talent while operating under tight compensation constraints. Dependent business owners will need to think more strategically about role design, compensation structures, and potentially even alternative visa categories.
Opinion: The Need for American National Unity in the Era of Great Power Conflict
It’s become obvious to anyone with access to a newspaper that the world is at an inflection point. The post–Cold War assumption of a stable, American-led unipolar order is eroding, and the erosion is accelerating. The race around artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, energy, and strategic infrastructure inherently favors consolidation of power rather than dispersion (i.e. see earlier bit on flying cars in China). Here is the uncomfortable truth: in the current global environment and its inevitable trajectory, the influence of empires will matter again. The American empire, once defined by military reach, financial systems, technology standards, alliances, and cultural gravity, is being tested by states that have spent decades preparing for a multipolar world.
Russia’s approach to Ukraine reflects a strategic logic centered less on negotiated settlement than on reshaping the post–Cold War security order. Moscow continues to frame NATO’s eastward expansion as a breach of earlier Western assurances, treating Ukraine not as an endpoint but as a buffer within a broader defensive perimeter. From this vantage point, time favors Russia: a prolonged conflict is seen as a means to strain European resources, test transatlantic cohesion, and outlast public tolerance for sustained risk within democratic systems. Accordingly, compromise is viewed as secondary to attrition, with an extended war understood as a mechanism to weaken opposing resolve and gradually realign the regional (and global) balance of power.
In the Pacific, China has now officially moved from long-term preparation to open signaling. In the last week, military exercises surrounding Taiwan (conducted with naval and air assets) seem less about rehearsal than demonstration. They are meant to challenge American credibility and to test whether the United States retains the political unity required to sustain its role as the stabilizing power in the region. Similar pressures are visible in the Middle East, where stalled diplomacy, regional militarization, and direct threats to American interests are converging at the same time (i.e. Syria). These are not isolated flashpoints; they are coordinated stress tests of the American empire’s capacity to respond coherently.
In response, the United States has begun to show its teeth by reasserting control closer to home. Recent policy moves reflect a renewed emphasis on hemispheric primacy consistent with a modern revival of the Monroe Doctrine, the idea that international powers will not be permitted to have any influence within the Western Hemisphere. Pressure on Venezuela, heightened attention to Arctic and Greenland positioning, and firmer postures toward regional alignment signal an American strategy of consolidation rather than retreat. The signals from the Pentagon and State Department are clear: America recognizes that empire competition has returned, and it is repositioning to defend core interests.
What makes this moment distinct is not only the presence of external challengers, but the degree of internal fragmentation within the United States itself. Political factions increasingly frame national questions as zero-sum domestic battles rather than shared strategic problems. Yet the incentives are misread. The beneficiaries of an American collapse (or even a prolonged American paralysis) are not internal rivals, but external powers that would gain from a weakened dollar.
History suggests that empires do not fail first from invasion, but from internal division that prevents coordinated response. National unity does not require ideological conformity, but it does require recognition of shared interests. The American dream, at its core, depends on economic stability, a shared and respected identity, free and secure trade, technological leadership, and predictable rule-based order. It is worth the fight to keep every such component alive.
Thank you for reading.
Sincerely,
Aman Cheema
