Going in, I assumed a strong core technology would mostly speak for itself in the market. Reading through the IR materials showed me otherwise — the same routing engine had to be defended against regulatory shifts, priced around a real partnership risk, and explained in a way that made its cost structure believable to a partner, not just an engineer. Framing questions that a company would actually have to answer, rather than ones I already knew the answer to, was the harder and more useful exercise.