The pitch decks are still in a drawer. Four times in six years she took the meetings, ran the numbers, and said no — not because the terms were bad, but because every model that justified the money assumed a company three times the size of the one she wanted to run.
The business today has forty-one employees, no debt, and margins that would embarrass most of its funded competitors. It also grew nine percent last year, which in her industry is considered a disappointment by people who do not own it.
Her argument is not against capital. It is against the specific bargain in which capital buys speed and speed costs control.
