Six principles. Non-negotiable. They're what you'd hear us repeat in a closing meeting, in an IC memo, at a founder dinner. We wrote them down because it's easier to turn down a bad mandate in writing than in the moment.
Fixed fees. No success-based compensation, on either side of the table. No implementation upsell after an FDD. No broker mandate on a fundraising.
Anything else is sales dressed as advisory. We'd rather lose a mandate than lose the right to tell a client something inconvenient.
We don't translate. SaaS has its language: ARR, NRR, NDR, CAC payback, LTV/CAC, burn multiple, rule of 40, cohort retention. Deep tech has its own: gross margin ramp, unit economics at scale, capex intensity and payback, TRL and commercial readiness, order backlog. We read both, natively.
Generalist FDD firms read tech books the way tourists read menus. They get the words right and the substance wrong. Tech has its own reality: what counts as revenue in a SaaS, what counts as a pilot in deep tech, what counts as growth when scaling a line vs. scaling seats.
We sit as CFOs in operating tech companies. Currently.
That changes how we read a file. We know what gets adjusted before a raise. We know where numbers hide. We know which KPIs a founder can truthfully defend and which ones fall apart under 20 minutes of pressure.
No retail. No services. No industrial. No "we've also done some". Tech, and only tech.
It's why we know what normal looks like. It's why a red flag jumps off the page for us in the first hour of a mandate.
Every mandate is led by senior advisors with first-hand experience in the role you are operating. CFOs of tech companies. Fund partners who have signed off on FDDs. Operators who have closed the rounds we now help others run.
The senior who scopes the work delivers it and signs the report. From first call to final deliverable, you get the depth of experience of the person on the call, applied directly to your file.
We write short, useful reports. Executive summary on one page. Appendix only if it earns its place. Every number ties to a source, every claim to a test.
Simplicity is the work behind the clarity. Stripping away what doesn't matter. Distilling a complex situation into a clear decision. We do that work, so the next move is obvious to everyone in the room.
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Buy-side FDD, red flag review to portfolio monitoring.