Deals die of latency, not terms

The term sheet was fine. Both sides said so, on separate calls, a week apart. And that week is the whole story. One side’s lawyer was traveling. The other side read the silence as a signal and quietly restarted a conversation with someone else. Nobody said no. Nobody had to.

Here’s the thing about dead deals: most of them were never rejected. They cooled. Somewhere between “this looks right” and “let’s sign,” a gap opens up. A slow reply. An intro that never got made. A question that sat in an inbox over a weekend. And the momentum just drains out.

Speed is the one term nobody negotiates and everybody feels.

Ask people why a deal fell through and they’ll say price, or fit, or timing. Watch what actually happened and you’ll usually find a silence. Price gets argued line by line. Structure gets lawyered to death. But latency never shows up on a term sheet, so nobody manages it. A counterparty who hears back in an hour behaves differently than one who hears back on Thursday. Same answer. Different meaning, because the waiting rewrote it.

That’s why the introduction matters more than the negotiation. By the time two parties are talking, most of the clock has already been burned on months of not knowing the other side existed. Collapse that search to one warm handoff and you haven’t just saved time. You’ve delivered the deal while it’s still alive.

Victor Garcia routes capital, talent, and dealflow between operators who need to find each other.