You Can Meet Even When There Is No Round

A founder told us he is not raising this year. His reason was blunt: money cannot buy what he is short of right now, capacity is sufficient, and the R&D schedule does not speed up with cash. We said that is all the more reason to meet an investor.

Let us state the view first. The meeting held when you are not raising is worth the most. Why? Because with no deal pressure, neither side has to perform. The founder does not have to round out a story. The investor does not have to hold a posture. The talk is about the business itself: where it is hard, where it is stuck, what comes next. You can talk about all this at a roadshow too, but there every sentence is on the clock. A conversation in quiet times has no countdown. A question can be pushed to the bottom.

Trust Is a Function of Time

Meet only when the round opens and the investor has to judge a stranger in a few weeks. Meet in advance and he is verifying an observation: were the targets set back then met? The first runs on impressions, the second on evidence. Time is more honest than materials.

It shows most on a large single cheque. Past a certain size, what an investor is really buying is not the project. It is that someone is willing to vouch for this founder. A person you have met once or twice cannot vouch for that. Trust is a judgement that time has verified. Materials can be compressed, but time cannot.

So what does meeting early save? It saves the stretch of judging the person. Do that homework after the round opens and it costs weeks, and it eats the most expensive middle stretch of the sixty days. Do it before the round opens and it grows on its own through the months when the window has not come. We are not idle in those months either — sitting on the bench with a company for ten months is exactly this. The arithmetic is not hard.

So who should be met early? Whoever can price. The first duty in investing is safety, not odds; until someone bids first, most firms are watching. Among the eight milestones of the sixty days, organising the lead investor sits at D26, which looks late. But that person's view of the company usually forms long before D26. Meeting early moves that formation period outside the round. Whoever fires first needs a longer run-up.

Why We Are Willing to Introduce Early

Some ask what we get out of making introductions. We get the next time. We use that line from the Archive as a ruler: we recognise one thing only, whether the firm is willing to look at the next deal. It sounds generous, but the arithmetic is plain. We do twenty or thirty deals a year, and half are existing clients coming back for the next round. That is a repeat mandate, someone willing to give you the second one as well. It is the same on the investor side. The part that comes back is the capacity.

There is another layer. We insist on co-investing our own capital in the projects we serve deeply. Look at a project after you have paid in and the way you look changes; from a transaction-only view, the outlook is bound to be short. Letting investors see clearly, early, is no loss to us.

We hold the boundaries fairly tight. First, on a major project we share at once, before it starts, without waiting for the materials to be complete. Second, for a project we do not serve, a meeting carries one line of disclosure: we have invested, no referral, no group chat. Third, the gatekeeping we do for investors is not outsourced. Whether the orders close the loop, the founder's integrity, how far the shareholders will support — we verify these ourselves. Only a clean standing gives your words weight.

Will people then go around us and build the relationship directly? Of course. The hardware circle is small to begin with, and the first two rounds of a good project mostly come out of "a friend of a friend". We are not that worried. A position held by information asymmetry was never going to hold for long.

The price of introducing early is giving up control of the tempo. Worth it? We think so. The upstream logic is plain: hand over the insight first, then let time make the case for us.

A meeting, a deep conversation, and the insight has only started. Only on paper can it be checked and passed on. The next piece is about materials.