One Version, for Everyone Outside

A founder asked us: if the same number comes out differently to different investors, does it matter?

Our position first. It matters, and it matters more than most people assume. Information settles what the facts are. Wording settles how those facts get said. We ask two things of the wording. First, it can be verified. Second, it can go to the IC. Ready for the IC means the sentence can be taken into an investment committee and still stand when the most demanding person in the room presses on it. Why? Because the bill for mismatched versions is not settled in that meeting. It is settled in the next one.

The Archive gives Full-mandate collaboration six dimensions: Trust, Information, Narrative, Tempo, Relationships, Accountability. Trust first, Information second. That order is not a layout accident. Trust is the result of consistent wording, not its precondition.

More than one version, and trust goes to zero on the spot

The private market is a market of acquaintances. Two investors compare notes over a meal, find the same thing described differently, and nothing you explain afterwards gets heard. What does rebuilding trust cost? Far more than keeping the wording straight.

The most common slip is not in the size of a number. It is in the noun. We have had this conversation more than once. We confirm, and confirm again: do you mean orders or revenue? Revenue, comes the answer, so revenue goes into the materials. One last check before they go out, and now it is orders. (A de-identified, representative case.) Orders and revenue are one word apart. Apart in what? In whether the money has landed.

Ready for the IC means it survives being worked through line by line

A company that tells a story gets questioned. A company with cash flow gets checked. The logic of a dollar fund is straight: once there is commercialisation, due diligence cannot be avoided. In other words, the moment you put revenue and gross margin on the table, diligence changes format. It stops being true-or-false and becomes arithmetic.

Surviving the arithmetic does not mean filings as tidy as a listed company's. It asks one thing: every number can explain where it came from. Who signed it, which month it was recognised, whether it includes tax — the data room turns over all of it. So we do the evidence work before the materials go out. Materials go out on day nine. Deep diligence starts on day thirty-five. Twenty-six days in between. Anything adjusted at the last minute to look better will show after those twenty-six days.

Reconciling in advance is cooperation, not defence

A deal usually pulls in several shareholders and several partner lines. Any one of them gets an offhand question from their own boss and the wording can diverge. Our way is plain: before the materials go out, we meet once and align the wording. This is not distrust of anyone. Every source of information carries its own interest function. Admitting that is easier than guessing at each other.

There is an internal layer too. Outward, you need the certainty of someone who has seen a hundred cases. Inward, you need to know which of those you actually understood. Both stances have to be held at once. Holding both is hard. So we wrote it into the review sheet.

One version has a by-product: less effort. No need to remember who heard which version, so all the effort goes into making this one as hard as it can be. Hardest is not prettiest. As far as we can see, hardest means something plain: pull any sentence at random and the evidence is there.

One wording is not scripting. It is a ruler fitted to telling the truth: executable, checkable, reviewable. On this one we feel fairly sure.

(For Full-mandate collaboration and the six dimensions in full, see "Full-mandate collaboration" in the Archive.)