Even if you, personally are asking the question in a reasonable context where the answer is probably "yes", just saying it gets you bucketed into the "toxic peo

Even if you, personally are asking the question in a reasonable context where the answer is probably "yes", just saying it gets you bucketed into the "toxic people who must be contained or avoided" bucket in a lot of otherwise reasonable people's minds. Unless you are actually employed as a lawyer, it would probably be a good career move to strike discussions of legal risk from your vocabulary. This is America. We're here to make money, and to win. That means operating in a legal system that can work for us or against us depending on the law. If a startup is too immature to see my question as anything other than a straightforward request for information, then I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.