Board records must survive longer than most software companies do. If you fail, are acquired and sunset, or we simply leave — what happens to our decision records, and how do I know the history remains trustworthy?

The full executive answer

The design principle is that your records’ integrity must not depend on our continuity — so the answer is mechanics, not reassurance. Continuous self-custody first: every analysis, register and report exports to PowerPoint, Excel and PDF as a normal part of the workflow, so your board packs already live in your own document-retention system meeting-by-meeting; the platform’s failure could cost you the tool, but not the record of what your board saw and decided. On departure — voluntary or forced — full structured export ships today as working code built to GDPR Article 20 and DPDP Act 2023 portability standards: the complete corpus, in machine-readable formats, from a standard PostgreSQL store with no proprietary encoding to strand you.

The subtler question — how do you know exported history is trustworthy — is where the hash chain earns its keep: because each audit record is cryptographically linked to its predecessor, an exported log carries its own integrity proof; your auditor can verify after export, without us, that the chain is unbroken and nothing was altered or removed. Trustworthiness of the history is a mathematical property of the records themselves, not a service we have to be alive to provide — which is precisely the property an audit chair should demand of any system holding fiduciary evidence. In an acquisition-and-sunset scenario, the same mechanics apply on a timetable: contractual wind-down notice on enterprise terms, bulk export, chain verification, and source-code escrow with sunset among its release triggers as the backstop.

The honest boundaries: erasure obligations cut the other way too — when you instruct deletion under GDPR or DPDP, deletion executes, so your own retention schedule, not ours, must govern what you preserve before erasing; and long-term archival readability of exports is your records-management function’s domain — we hand over open formats precisely so that standard archival practice applies. Survivability by design, verifiable by mathematics, backstopped by contract: that is the whole answer, and none of it requires believing in my company’s immortality.