READ THE PAIRING, NOT THE PAPERWORK™
Most partnerships fail not on competence but on a mismatch that was legible before the paperwork and ignored. Two founders who both need the wheel; a money partner whose risk-clock runs faster than the operator's; a JV where one side treats the deal as a bet and the other as a marriage. These fractures are structural, present at the substrate on day one, and they surface eighteen months later as a deadlock no shareholder agreement resolves. This reads the pairing, not the résumés.
One engine. Every read through all seven layers.