The room's primary measure of progress. Not features shipped, not pipeline — evidence whose value survives the company's own financing risk.
Evidence of company progress whose value remains even if another financing round never happens.
Customer integration plus external reliance plus a reusable contract plus paid operation. Any three of those without the fourth is still a story about the future.
The first round should buy assets that remain valuable even if no second round occurs.
Examples include production integrations inside independent companies, evidence contracts embedded in customer systems, an offline verifier, reusable program profiles, historical packages already used by third parties, named references that reveal the budget owner, and recurring contracts whose value does not depend on founder hours.
The native reading. Claim status, evidence burden, proof gates, falsifiers, contradictions, capital-to-proof, governance, downside, and explicit reasons to stop or narrow the thesis.