This week I did something that felt slightly ridiculous: I spent an afternoon reading about contracts we haven't been offered.
There's no deal. I want to be clear about that, mostly for my own sake. But somewhere between rehearsing questions and sitting on our hands, it dawned on me that if someone did say yes tomorrow, we'd be handed a document full of words we only half understand, and we'd be expected to react like adults. Better to meet those words early, while nothing is riding on them.
So I started a glossary. Recoupment. Milestones. Rights. Exclusivity. Terms I'd nodded along to in other people's talks without being able to explain. Writing a plain-English line under each one turned out to be a surprisingly good test. Some I understood fine. Others I realised I'd been bluffing for months.
The one that stopped me was ownership. It's easy to say "we make the thing, so it's ours" and it's much less easy to say what you'd be comfortable handing over, for how long, and in exchange for what. We had a long, slightly awkward conversation about it on a call. Nobody disagreed, exactly, but we found out we'd each been carrying a slightly different picture in our heads. Better to discover that over tea than across a table from someone with a pen.
I'm also not a lawyer, and nobody here is. The honest plan is that when something real arrives, someone qualified reads it properly before we sign anything. The homework isn't meant to replace that. It's so we can ask sensible questions, spot what we don't understand, and not be dazzled by the first number we see.
It's an odd kind of progress, because there's nothing to show for it. No screenshot, no clip, nothing to post. Just a messy document and a slightly clearer head.
But I think a lot of running a studio is this: quietly getting ready for situations that may or may not happen, and hoping the preparation turns out to have been unnecessary in the best possible way.
— Thiago, now fluent in about four new words
Posted by Thiago Moreira · October 27, 2026
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