Pre-incorporation / pre-wire. No institutional payroll, no office lease, no formal operating company bank account yet.
Cost categories (current — pre-wire)
| Category | Posture |
|---|---|
| Founder time | Primary “burn” — unpaid / deferred compensation until entity + raise |
| Compute | Commodity / free-tier paths only (local MuJoCo, Colab/Kaggle) for evidence compounding |
| SaaS / hosting | Site + dataroom hosting, GitHub, domain — low fixed monthly |
| Legal | Deferred until equity/IP pack signed and Atlas incorporation from the check |
Paid GPU scale, travel-heavy GTM, and founder salary wait on the first wire — see Use of funds.
What is intentionally not in this repo
- Personal bank balances, salaries, or founder living expenses
- Exact monthly USD burn rate as a single number (varies by personal situation)
Detailed personal burn, if needed for a specific investor conversation, stays in private storage linked from the room — never committed to git or the public site deploy.
Runway narrative for diligence
Until wire:
- Evidence depth is gated by commodity compute + founder focus, not by a large opex base
- Soft-raise materials size the first check at $1.0M / ~12 months for full operating burn (Use of funds)
After wire:
- Burn follows the locked buckets (team · compute · product · GTM · legal · buffer)
- Success measured against the four post-close milestones on Milestone model