Sixty Days Is a Schedule

A founder once asked us: this round is not urgent, can we take it slowly?

Our view first. Slow is fine. Scattered is not. Sixty days is not a marketing number, it is a schedule; it is not a squeeze on speed, it is eight things locked into one window. Why? Three layers below.

The eight milestones in the Archive are the only public statement of them: D01 building the fact base, D09 developing professional materials, D18 calibrating market expectations, D26 organising the lead investor, D35 supporting deep due diligence, D43 coordinating the investment committee, D52 negotiating core terms, D60 closing the funds. The fact base means every sentence afterwards stands on the same set of facts. Eight milestones spread across sixty days is seven and a half days each. That sounds even. It is not.

The window does not open because you need it to

The real constraint is not in the company, it is in the window. Windows are counted in weeks, not quarters. We have seen it happen: several rounds of talks across a year, and the week that actually laid the foundation was one of them; the rest carried on by momentum. Which is to say, before taking a mandate you do the arithmetic on time, and only then on whether it can be done. Even an easy raise has a deadline: if it cannot be finished inside sixty days, the conclusion has to be worked out again from the start — same material, same people. The window does not wait.

So what are the sixty days racing for? For someone to fire first.

The first duty is safety, not odds

Everything before D26 is laid down for that one day. The lead investor is the first party willing to write the price down. Why? Because nobody wants to price alone. Whoever moves first carries the risk of getting the price wrong on their own, so everyone waits for someone else to move. But once one sufficiently credible firm names a price, the question in front of everyone else turns into a different one: from "is it worth it" into "is there any allocation left". The cost of deciding drops.

So we do not argue for convincing everyone at once. What matters more to us is finding the one who is willing and able to price. On this one we are fairly confident.

A word on reputation while we are here. A big name is not a problem. But a big-name firm has seen too many similar projects; more reference points, a longer chain, and it is naturally at a disadvantage in a short window. A mid-sized firm that does only late-stage deals has a single standard and a short decision chain, and can run the whole course in two weeks. Reputation and effectiveness inside this window are two different things. The second is the one that counts.

As we see it, for a company the market has already accepted, the real question has changed too. Not whether it can raise, but how fast and how full inside the window. Money is not scarce. Time is.

To be clear: sixty days is a typical framework, not a promise. The actual schedule moves with the company's readiness, the market window and the complexity of the deal — when the window had not come, we sat on the bench with one company for ten months; when it comes, the eight milestones lock end to end. Fast and slow are both approaches. Scattered is the accident.

As for which day your round should start from, it depends on how clean the fact base is. That can only be talked through one company at a time.