Walsh & Partners
Since 2017 · San Francisco · New York · London
A quarterly read on the financial mechanics founders actually sweat — cap tables, runway, board packs, and the unglamorous arithmetic of getting from one round to the next. Written by the senior partners who do the work.
— The Four Channels
Every piece we publish lives in one of four channels — the financial decisions a Series A–C founder or CFO actually loses sleep over. Pick the one that matches your problem this quarter; we'll route you straight to the relevant pieces.
Dilution math, option-pool top-ups, 409A refreshes, founder vesting resets, and the quiet waterfalls that erode control before a term sheet arrives.
14 essaysBurn multiples, default-alive thresholds, scenario modeling under revenue miss, and the moment to start a process before the board forces your hand.
11 essaysWhat goes on page one, which KPIs survive a skeptical director, narrative structure for bad quarters, and how to retire a slide that no longer earns its place.
9 essaysOutreach sequencing, data room construction, dilution modeling under multiple term sheets, and how to read a lead investor's pattern before you sign.
17 essays
Plate I — The 11-day model. Photograph from the Walsh & Partners archives.
Issue Lead · Required Reading
Most founders spend three weeks building the materials their board will read in forty-five minutes. We reverse-engineered what an operating-CFO-grade pack actually looks like — and timed our team doing it from raw data. The median was eleven business days. Here is the exact sequence, the eight slides that earn their place, and the four that quietly die in every pack we audit.
Read the lead essay— The Most Recent Six Issues
The full archive runs deeper than what's here — these are the six most recent pieces, selected by the partners. Subscribe by RSS or browse by channel above.
Runway Math · 12 min
A clean formula for the moment a SaaS company stops being able to absorb a revenue miss with existing capital — and the three signals a CFO should watch in the model before the board meeting forces the conversation.
Cap Table Hygiene · 9 min
Stale 409As quietly destroy option-pool economics at the worst possible time — usually mid-process with a term sheet on the table. A practitioner's note on cadence, vendor selection, and what to do if yours is more than fourteen months old.
Fundraising Mechanics · 22 min
Partner add-ons, follow-on history, public board commentary, and the four less-obvious signals that predict whether a fund will actually wire. Includes a one-page diligence checklist our team runs on every prospective lead.
Board Pack Design · 7 min
A short, opinionated audit of the recurring slides we cut from client packs every quarter — and the replacement slide each one frees up. Useful as a checklist before your next board cycle.
Runway Math · 15 min
Burn multiple gets cited constantly and understood poorly. We work through three anonymized client models to show what the number actually says about capital efficiency — and what it doesn't.
Cap Table Hygiene · 11 min
The Series A term sheet almost always includes an option-pool refresh sized against the post-money valuation. The math is straightforward; the negotiating posture is not. A walkthrough of how to model the real dilution before you sign.
A founder who can't explain their burn multiple in one sentence hasn't finished thinking about it yet. Our job — and this publication's job — is to help you finish that sentence before the board meeting does it for you.
— Reader Questions