**A question card for interviews you conduct yourself, at an event, with a recorder running.** The
third interview pack, and the only one where a human does the interviewing. Pack 09 assumes half an
hour and a quiet room; a summit gives you five minutes, standing, in a hall with a PA system, with
somebody who has a meeting at the top of the hour. Different constraints, different instrument.

**Four fixed questions, asked identically to everybody.**

1. In one sentence, what do you make, and **who pays for it**?
2. What can you do today that you couldn't do eighteen months ago?
3. What's the hard part — technology, money, or people? *(make them pick one)*
4. What does everyone say about AI in Portugal that doesn't match what you see?

Improvising the spine feels better in the moment and destroys the comparison. **Asked identically,
twenty conversations become something you can count** — how the hard part splits across twenty
founders, what capability actually changed in eighteen months, whether they disagree with the
consensus about the same thing. Counting is the one thing this newsroom can do that a blog cannot.

**And the closing question, which is the strongest thing in the pack:** *"who else here should I be
talking to, and why them?"* It draws a map of the room from the inside, and it is the question
easiest to skip at four in the afternoon.

**The card exists in English and in Portuguese**, and it renders at 390px because it will be read on
a phone in a hall, which the browser gate checks.

**The first content on this site born in one language and published in another.** The recording is
in English; the site publishes European Portuguese. The pack proposes the rule and `empresas`/issue
009 asks the editor to make it one:

- **The transcript is never translated.** It is evidence, and evidence is not translated — the same
  rule that keeps a frozen page's bytes untouched.
- **A translated quotation carries its original, or it stops being a quotation** and becomes a
  summary in our words, unquoted. This publication's whole claim is that what sits between
  quotation marks is what was said.
- **The interviewee approves the Portuguese**, not only the English. They are being quoted in a
  language they may not have chosen.
- The article says, in its provenance, which language the conversation was in.

**There is no ninth section, and that was not a choice.** The editor asked for a "Portuguese
Startups" section; `CLAUDE.md` fixes the brief's eight and is deny-listed. A startup is a company
and `empresas` is the brief's section for companies — so the interviews land there as a **series**,
which is a shape inside a section rather than a section of its own. Issue 009 carries the naming
decision, and notes that a series name is read by a reader and is therefore Portuguese.

*What a founder says about their own company is a primary source. What they say about the market is
a lead to verify, exactly like a line in a research delivery — a number said confidently at a summit
is still a number with no source behind it.*