nocklisted

# Nock > Nock your pitch before you take the shot. Pressure-tests a deck against how one seed–Series A VC (Nikunj Kothari) actually pushes on a pitch and reads a founder — distilled from 53 of his real pitch & diligence meetings plus his written philosophy. It tells a founder the questions he'd ask and, more importantly, what he'd find missing. ## The two reference files (read BOTH before analyzing) - `lens/question-bank.md` — 12 themes of the questions he repeatedly asks, ranked by how often they come up, each with canonical questions, real (anonymized) example phrasings, and a cross-link to the principle beneath it. - `lens/principles.md` — **how he reads a founder, in his own voice. Read this first — it's the soul.** **The Pull** (is this a haunting, or FOMO?), **earned secrets** (the two-of-three bar + the four-follow-up test, "LOVE the customer"), **revealed preferences** (what they *did*, not what they say — "what were they using before?"), **latitude + agency** (vision *and* the next step; rewrite the rules), **the bar moved** (10x is the floor; icebergs, not the commodity playbook), **org structure as the opening** (why incumbents can't follow), and the **dinner test**. ## Important framing — how the lens transfers The lens is distilled from **open-ended conversations**, NOT deck walk-throughs. In real meetings he does *not* sit through slides — he'd rather have a conversation, and his questions are live reactions. So the corpus captures his **unde