Translating Intent into Language

Founders often ask us: the thing is genuinely good, so why does the investor go quiet afterwards?

Let me put the view first. When two sides cannot agree, usually the gap is not too wide; the words have not met. Why? Several layers sit in between. The founder speaks the language of technology, the institution hears the language of risk and return. Two languages talking past each other. It is not that anyone is dishonest. It is that intent has not yet been translated into language.

The Archive breaks our work into five things, and the second is called "translating value into language": turning a company's real hard value into the standard language that investment institutions and their investment committees can decide on efficiently. This one looks most like copywriting. It is not copywriting.

Translation is not packaging

Packaging means claiming what is not there. Translation means helping someone say the thing he has already thought and cannot get out.

An example, figures illustrative. A joint saves sixty per cent of the volume of a conventional direct-drive design. The customer neither sees that sixty per cent nor pays for it. Translation splits it up: thirty per cent goes to cleaning area, thirty per cent to obstacle clearance. Both can be written into a purchase order. How far ahead the specification is does not decide anything; whether there is a chain running from the specification to the customer's ledger does. We call this doing the maths: reducing every piece of technology to a cost curve and a revenue structure. The five things come down to three words — do the maths, read the trend, land the people.

And the other end? Turning capital's worries back into plain speech.

First work out what the other side actually wants

The first step is not speaking. It is working out what the other side wants.

What is said and what is wanted are often not the same. First, some want efficiency per unit of time. Second, some want the valuation one step higher. Third, some only want cash in hand. The three ask identical questions and want things an order of magnitude apart. Misread one of the three and the eight milestones across sixty days are laid out for nothing.

Can the founder not translate it himself? Mostly he cannot.

There is an easier philosophy: break the project into a string of shallow tasks and work the checklist. It holds, but it is not the only one. A checklist scales; it will not dig out the need the founder himself has not noticed. Between what a person says and what he thinks there is always a gap. That gap is our work.

Is there a risk of hearing it wrong? There is.

So translation comes after evidence. Recovering the fact base is the first thing: patents, orders, quality of revenue, team structure, latent risks, turned over one by one. A sentence glossed over in the deck costs ten times as long to explain at due diligence. By then the cost of changing one page has become the cost of changing a timetable. Translation that skips this step is invention.

Whether the translation is accurate, the market tells you on the spot

We do not force consensus. We pick only the fruit both sides have already ripened. A ripe one comes down in a sentence; a green one will not come off however much you talk. Who decides whether it is ripe? The market, not us.

The limits should be stated plainly. So far, translation can move the pricing range; it cannot move a company's fundamentals. Turning your own confidence in a company into stubbornness about price is the easiest mistake in this trade. Hardness belongs in the judgment, not in the quote. Managing expectations is not conceding. It trades a deal that cannot be done for one that can be finished. Finish first, then argue about good and bad.

We do twenty to thirty mandates a year, half new, half existing clients coming back for the next round. That repeat-mandate record cannot be gamed, and it is the measure of whether our translation was accurate.

The company always holds the final commercial decision. The translator decides for no one.

Glacier's philosophy is a philosophy of integrity. It is not used to persuade anyone. It is used to restore.

(The business statement and the three words — do the maths, read the trend, land the people — are in the Archive, under "Glacier Capital's Core Business".)