By the third month, the division had sourced four new deals from outside the established relationship network—three of which moved to term sheet stage. The communication protocol between research and investment committee had been restructured so that analysis reached the committee forty-eight hours before any decision meeting, with a mandatory response cycle that required committee members to submit questions in advance. The deal flow problem was being addressed through a new partnership with three university entrepreneurship programs and two industry accelerators that had not previously been in the Reed Financial orbit.
It was real work. It was demanding and detailed and sometimes frustrating and occasionally exhilarating—the exhilaration that comes from a system beginning to function the way it was designed to, the particular satisfaction of watching something you built start to hold its own weight.
Emily worked long hours, but they were not the anxious hours of someone trying to prove something. They were the hours of someone absorbed in a problem they find genuinely interesting.