---
title: Questions to ask
description: Questions for Nick, grouped by when to use them, with what each one is for and what a good answer sounds like.
sidebar:
  icon: message-circle
---

Dave's standard: no softballs. Every question below is either something only Nick can answer or something that makes him think. Pick four to six; the small-talk ones go first, the closer goes last.

:::info[The one Dave loved]
"What are you continuously looking to preserve, and what are you totally open to changing?" Dave's own answer: preserve velocity plus accuracy without trading quality, the talent bar, the product; open to changing everything, per Egoless Execution. Ask Nick the same and compare answers.
:::

## Small talk (first five minutes)

<Accordion>
  <AccordionItem title="You did YC with Stock Unlock. What did the batch actually change for a consumer subscription product beyond the 500k?">
    **For:** founder-to-founder opener. My side in one line: interviewed on the pre-Sonr prototype, did not get in, raised anyway.
    **Good answer:** specifics about office hours, the Demo Day forcing function, or investor access, rather than "the network."
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="Did Demo Day pressure help or hurt a product that launched off a four-month Discord beta?">
    **For:** shows I read the launch history. Invites a real opinion about forcing functions.
    **Follow-up:** whether he and Chris considered YC for Hanover Park or went straight to Emergence.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="You have been the technical co-founder twice with someone else out front. Was that a choice, or how it fell out?">
    **For:** the cofounding conversation. My contrast: solo for five years, and what I want now is the engineering seat, not the fundraising one.
    **Good answer:** how he and Chris divide decisions in a company with no PMs.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="Forty percent of your engineers are ex-founders. What do they get wrong in the first six months?">
    **For:** signals self-awareness about my own transition and gives me his checklist.
    **Good answer:** concrete failure modes (over-scoping, reluctance to be told no, building for a customer that is not theirs).
  </AccordionItem>
</Accordion>

## Technical (during or after the design)

<Accordion>
  <AccordionItem title="How is the general ledger modeled: event-sourced journal with derived balances, or mutable state with an audit table? What forced that call?">
    **For:** his home turf. Sets up the reversing-entry conversation.
    **Bridge:** on-chain state is append-only by construction; the interesting part is the derived read models and how corrections are posted.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="Where exactly is the line between what an agent may commit and what a CPA must approve, and how is that confidence measured rather than guessed?">
    **For:** the human-in-the-loop thesis, which is also the differentiator in the design.
    **Good answer:** thresholds, review queues, evals on real edge cases, cost per document.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="Trigger.dev for long-running inference versus SST or Lambda: what pushed background work onto Trigger, and what breaks first?">
    **For:** shows I know the stack from two independent sources (JD and John).
    **Bridge:** I ran Durable Objects for the same class of problem; curious where the wrapper-over-EC2 model bites.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="A decade of books for 30+ entities in about 100 hours. What is the migration harness, and how do you prove the migrated books tie out?">
    **For:** the Asylum migration is the achievement to compliment. John owns the pipeline; Nick owns the correctness proof.
    **Bridge:** the Cosmos to Base migration was the same problem with a smaller ledger and no CPA.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="Supabase and Postgres as the system of record at 30B AUA heading past 100B: what is the first thing that stops scaling, and what is the plan?">
    **For:** the exit-ramp question. I agree with the managed default; I want his outgrow point.
    **Watch:** do not propose Kubernetes. Let him say where the seam is.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="The MCP server puts fund data into Claude and ChatGPT. How do you scope permissions and prevent leakage across entities?">
    **For:** authorization is my domain (UCAN, capability-based auth). One question, not a lecture.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="What would you rebuild in the ledger today with hindsight?">
    **For:** the founder-hindsight question. Every CTO has an answer and enjoys giving it.
  </AccordionItem>
</Accordion>

## Role and team

<Accordion>
  <AccordionItem title="With no PMs and no designers, who decides a feature is done and who owns the review surface when agents and CPAs disagree?">
    **For:** ownership model in practice. Also tells me what the work trial will grade.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="John said his migration pipeline dropped onboarding from months to hours. What is the next bottleneck of that size?">
    **For:** references a specific conversation with his engineer; asks for the roadmap without asking for the roadmap.
  </AccordionItem>
  <AccordionItem title="The design engineer hire works directly with you. What is the interaction pattern you most want solved for humans and agents side by side?">
    **For:** signals I read the other JD and care about the front-end half, which La Rosa said I under-sold.
  </AccordionItem>
</Accordion>

## Closer

"What are you continuously looking to preserve, and what are you totally open to changing?"

Then, if there is time: "What would make you say no to me after today?" Direct, and it gives him the opening to name the gap while I can still address it.

## The question he will ask me

"Why are we still interviewing you?" The real question is why Hanover Park. Not "Sonr is sunsetting and you are a rocket ship." The answer, in order:

<Steps>
  <Step title="The problem">
    Money movement that has to be right, with an AI layer that prepares and a human that approves. I spent five years on the version of that where the human is a wallet owner and the mistake is irreversible.
  </Step>
  <Step title="The team">
    Chris cold-inbounded me. Dave, La Rosa, and John each described the same company: no PMs, engineers own a metric back to front, 40% ex-founders. Every conversation confirmed the last one.
  </Step>
  <Step title="The work">
    Rebuilt ledger, waterfall engine, the Asylum migration, first MCP server in the space. I want to build the next one of those, not fundraise for it.
  </Step>
</Steps>