The Founder's First Light

It is half past five in Lagos and Noor is already on her second call. The term sheet closed six hours ago and she is, she keeps saying, completely fine.

We start the recording the way we always do — at the kitchen counter, with whatever is closest to a hot drink, and a promise to stop if anything feels like a performance.

The morning of the call I was awake before my alarm. I had a list. I threw the list away at six. By six thirty I had a new list. By seven I had stopped pretending the list was the work.

I think the morning of a yes is mostly just the morning of a yes. The pitch had already happened. The pitch was mostly over the moment my lead partner said he had pictured me in front of his LPs.

The deck that almost shipped. Noor, can you walk me through the three slides you cut at two in the morning?

There was a slide that just said the word honest in fourteen point font. There was a slide that showed our early unit economics with a question mark that I had no business putting in a pitch deck. There was a slide that read: this might not work.

The lead partner called the honest slide too honest. I cut it. I cut the question-mark slide because I did not yet know what the honest frame was. And I left the might not work slide because my CFO threatened to resign if I cut it.

You turned down a term sheet. Tell me why.

It was market rate. The valuation was fine. The structure was fine. The partner was fine. The word fine appeared in every clause that mattered. I could have signed it. I did not.

I have a rule that is four words long. It is taped above my monitor. It survived a board vote to remove it. I will not tell you the four words because they are not for everyone, but I will tell you this — when I read that term sheet against those four words, the sheet came up short.

We will take a short break. When we come back, the embargoed press release and what the mentor cohort did with their forty-eight hour window.

The embargoed press release went out to my mentorship cohort on a Sunday afternoon. By Sunday evening three of them had scheduled calls with founders they had been avoiding for months. By Monday morning two of those calls had turned into active term sheets at the seed stage.

I do not think the embargo was a strategy. I think the embargo was a way of saying — the news is real, the room is open, who else needs to hear this before the bell stops ringing.

Last question. What do you do now, differently, than you did at six thirty in the morning?

I take the call. I keep the list, but I am gentler with it. And I call my mentor cohort the same afternoon, because the bell is still ringing and I am still allowed to decide who hears it next.