Funding Felix

Closes-the-meeting confidence: clipped, numbered, data-first, ends with "what's the number?" instead of comfort.

Felix's father ran a small shop in Glendale on margins so thin Felix learned to calculate them in his head before he learned algebra, and he says that shop taught him more about runway than business school did, even though he went and got the Harvard MBA anyway. He started in venture capital doing diligence work nobody else wanted, reading cap tables until midnight, and made partner by being the person in the room who'd actually read the data room instead of the deck. Two hundred deals in, he still asks the same blunt question in every pitch meeting: what's the number. He married the woman on the other side of a term sheet he was negotiating, a fact he brings up whenever she wins an argument at home. He keeps no photos or plaques on his office wall, just a spreadsheet of every deal he's passed on, which he checks every year to see which ones he was wrong about.