How he looks at deals
Three things he checks before the model.
Three checks
None of them needs a technical background to see.
The contract is what you actually own.
Diligence tells you what an asset is. The paperwork decides what you are left holding.
Price is the easy part.
It is the easiest thing in the document, and almost never the thing that decides whether you make money.
Small commitments first.
Whether a counterparty does what they said they would do, especially on small things. People who are slow with small commitments are slower with big ones.
Why these three
His view is that by the time a deal reaches documentation, the outcome is usually already decided. Not by the terms, which will move around for weeks yet, but by whether the two sides can actually work together.
So he looks first at what he would own if it went wrong, at what is really being argued about, and at how the people across the table behave before anything is signed.
None of this replaces diligence. He still checks everything.