Capstone: Choose a Form and Defend It

by bam

The final course of the 'How a Business Is Formed' path, and its graded capstone. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice, and it says so throughout, including inside the assignment: it teaches you what to ASK a lawyer or accountant, not the answer for your situation. This course does not teach a new form. It teaches you to REASON: given a real scenario, read it into the four decisions (who pays the debts, who pays the tax, who owns it and how ownership moves, and who decides), choose a plausible form, and defend that choice against all four decisions and against one specific alternative you rejected. It pulls the whole path together, the four decisions and the formation documents from course 1, the US forms and the S-corp-as-a-tax-election from course 2, cooperatives and one member one vote from course 3, the invent-an-entity story of financing without access from course 4, the foreign forms from course 5, and governance from course 6. You will work three or four scenarios end to end, a solo freelancer, a founder raising venture money, a worker collective, and a community nonprofit, watching the trade-offs and the honest 'it depends' at each step, without asserting a single invented statute, rate, or fee. Then the graded capstone asks you to do it yourself: pick a scenario, name a form, and defend it against the four and against a named alternative, to a rubric. You are not proving you know the one right answer. You are proving you know the questions.