Buried in the Footnotes: Why It Pays to Pay Attention to Things Nobody Cares About

There’s a certain kind of career that doesn’t start with a big idea or a grand strategy. It starts with reading the fine print. Not because anyone asked you to. Not because it was glamorous. But because you were curious, or maybe just stubborn, and decided to pay attention to the thing everyone else was skipping.

That’s how I started. Not in a lab or a boardroom, but in the margins—reading laws. Regulations. Draft legislation. The kind of documents that even policymakers barely skim. I wasn’t trying to be contrarian. I was just trying to figure out what they meant. Not today. Not even tomorrow. But two or three years down the line—when the ink dried and the market moved and someone, somewhere, finally noticed that the world had shifted half a degree off-axis.

This is a deeply unfashionable skill. But in healthcare, in policy, in market access—or just plain old lobbying—it’s priceless. Because the game isn’t played when the bill is passed or the regulation published. It’s played before—in the margins, the drafts, the committee minutes that no one reads because they assume someone else is already watching.

They aren’t.

The same principle applies to SEC filings. Everyone loves a press release. Fewer people read Form 10-Ks. Fewer still read the footnotes. But if you’ve ever bothered to actually comb through one, you know: the truth is usually buried between the boilerplate and the conditional language. Not in the rosy “We’re excited to announce…” but in the sentence buried 130 pages in: “We may not achieve profitability and may require additional financing.”

That’s not legal noise. That’s the business model screaming through a gag.

Which brings us to Michael Burry—perhaps the patron saint of footnote readers. A former neurologist, he left medicine and started Scion Capital in his spare time, posting long-form investment theses on stock message boards like it was 1999. He had no formal finance background, no blue-chip firm on his résumé. What he did have was a commitment to reading things completely. Mortgage bond prospectuses. CDO structures. Rating methodologies. Page by page, until he spotted what everyone else missed: the assumptions were false. The risk was structural. The collapse was inevitable.

He wasn’t first because he was brilliant. He was first because he read what others ignored.

In The Big Short, Christian Bale plays Burry as musically obsessive, socially off-kilter, and mildly unhinged. But the most important thing about him isn’t dramatized—it’s that he didn’t outsource his thinking. He saw the cracks in the system because he was willing to do the unglamorous work of reading the entire thing. He found the line, the clause, the exception that everyone else had skimmed. And then he bet the house.

That same kind of stubborn literacy matters everywhere, especially in private markets and startup land. I’ve lost count of how many founders I’ve seen nod through valuations they didn’t understand, sign term sheets they barely read, or assume their lawyers would just “handle the details.” But the details are the deal. If you don’t know how your cap table waterfalls under different scenarios, what your valuation rests on, or how a preference stack works in liquidation, you are not negotiating. You are cosplaying a CEO while someone else sets the terms.

And yes, lawyers are helpful. They’re essential. But remember: they’re not your co-founders. They’re not your investors. And in every deal, someone else’s lawyer is reading the same clause with very different incentives. So read it yourself. Ask the stupid question. Print the appendix. Understand your own dilution mechanics. You don’t need to be a legal expert. But you do need to look.

This isn’t about being cynical. It’s about being sober. Because the most dangerous parts of any deal, any law, any contract—are never in the headline. They’re buried. They’re boring. And that’s exactly why they go unchallenged.

Michael Burry made billions not by outsmarting the market, but by outreading it. That is not a one-time story. It’s a replicable discipline.

So whether you’re evaluating a biotech partner, negotiating an investment, or reading a new EU regulation that looks suspiciously ambiguous—go past the summary. Find the raw material. Find the contradiction. Find the thing that doesn't quite add up. Because that’s often where the truth lives.

And if you're ever in doubt, just remember: the people who shape the future don’t just have vision. They have the patience to read the thing nobody else does.