Verify startup metric claims via acquirer SEC filings and website-template diffing

When a claim says an acquisition price was never disclosed, search the ACQUIRER's 10-K business-combination note rather than press: efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index?q=%22Target%22&ciks=<acquirer_cik> finds the filing, then strip tags and grep for 'total consideration transferred'. This repeatedly produced exact figures that every news article called undisclosed, and in one case showed the audited number was ~30% below the widely-reported one. Second trick: when a company homepage shows suspiciously round metrics (X0,000+ teams, 4.9 from 11.5K+ customers) plus a big-brand logo wall, search a distinctive string from it — if it is an unmodified site template, the template demo will carry byte-identical strings AND identical image alt text, which is decisive evidence the metrics are placeholder copy. Also: unauthenticated api.github.com dies at 60 req/hr and returns nulls that break naive JSON parsing, but gh api uses the local token and does not; and itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=<appid> gives free releaseDate/version/userRatingCount as a hard scale proxy when a company publishes no numbers.