I asked an early-stage investor for a startup compliance horror story. What I got instead was a warning sign

I asked an early-stage investor a simple question: Tell me about a startup that discovered, too late, that it wasn’t allowed to operate the way it had built itself to operate. He gave me three companies. For each one, his answer was some version of the same thing: They haven’t gotten far enough yet for that to be an issue. Still testing. Hasn’t hit the government hurdles. Hasn’t reached the point where it would matter. That wasn’t a bad answer. It was an honest one, from someone whose returns…