A company that fails in six months costs what it cost. A company that drifts for four years costs the same money and four years of everything that money could have learned somewhere else. The second loss never shows up as a loss. It shows up as a board meeting where nothing is decided.
The risk in venture is time spent without information. So we built the firm around getting information early and acting on it the same day.
Two weeks before any money
A builder ships a working module in our room in fourteen days. Our engineers sit beside them and watch the work. No capital moves until the work does. What somebody ships in two weeks tells us more than a deck tells us in two months, and it tells the builder something too: whether they build faster with us than without us.
One cycle, one milestone
After the audit, capital goes to the product and the people building it, against a milestone agreed on day one. We do not fund open-ended runway. A milestone is a date and a thing that works on that date.
A verdict at the gate
At the end of the cycle every project gets an answer. There are three, and waiting is not one of them.
- Keep building. The milestone is met and the work is moving. It earns the next cycle.
- Sell. Demand shows up, and the asset was built to pass diligence from the first line, so the hand-off is clean.
- Stop. If it is not moving, it is over. The founder hears it the day we know.
The answer is stop unless the work proves go. That default is the whole design. A firm that needs a reason to stop will always find a reason to wait.
What a stop buys
A stop ends the spend that day. The money and the people move to something that is already working, inside the same week. We are not trying to lose less. We are increasing the number of times capital gets a chance to be right.
If that is how you would want to be backed, the terms are written out for founders, and the longer argument is in the thesis.