The Ritual of Finality

My hand moves in a rhythm that feels more like a ritual than a job. The ‘J’ loops downward, catching the grain of the heavy bond paper, followed by the sharp, practiced ‘L’ that slices through the silence of an office that should have been empty 8 hours ago. I’ve spent the better part of this evening practicing this signature, perfecting the way the ink pools at the end of the stroke. It isn’t vanity. When you are João L., a bankruptcy attorney who specializes in the slow-motion car crashes of ‘high-growth’ startups, your signature becomes the official period at the end of a very long, very loud sentence. It has to look certain. It has to look final.

There is a specific smell to a company that is about to vanish. It’s not the smell of failure-failure is sour. This is the smell of expensive coffee, brand-new ergonomic chairs that cost $888 a piece, and the ozone of a server room that’s running too hot because they scaled before they understood what they were building. People call it ‘Idea 25’ in the niche circles I run in. It’s that tipping point where the ambition of the founder outpaces the physics of the bank account. They think they are building a rocket ship, but from where I sit, behind a mahogany desk that has seen 18 years of liquidations, they are just building a very elaborate bonfire.

The Ghost of Scale

I’ve watched 38-year-old CEOs weep in that chair across from me, not because they’re broke, but because they realized they traded a perfectly stable, profitable $8 million company for a $108 million valuation that didn’t actually exist. They chased the ghost of scale and lost the ghost in the machine.

I remember a client from 2018. He had this idea for decentralized logistics-let’s call it a revolution in how we move things from point A to point B. He was making $188,000 a month in pure profit with a team of 8 people. He was happy. Then he took the Series A. He was told that stability was for the weak, that if he didn’t capture the market in 18 months, someone else would. So he hired 118 people. He moved into a glass box in the city. He stopped looking at the logistics and started looking at the headcount. By the time he reached my office, he had $8 in his personal savings account and a tax lien that looked like a phone number.

The Power of ‘Enough’

There’s a certain power in the word ‘enough,’ a word that is currently banned in the boardrooms of the people I usually have to sue. They view ‘enough’ as a lack of imagination. I view it as a structural insurance policy. If you can’t survive a 48% drop in revenue for six months, you don’t have a business; you have a hostage situation where the market is holding the gun.

I want to see a business that is still around in 28 years, not because it ‘disrupted’ an industry, but because it served its customers so well that the industry couldn’t imagine life without it.

I find myself thinking about the texture of the ink again. It’s a strange thing to be the one who turns off the lights. People think I’m cynical, but I’m actually a romantic. I want things to last. […] But that kind of longevity requires a patience that the current venture capital ecosystem treats as a defect. They want the 10x exit, not the 100-year legacy.

Sometimes, when the office is quiet and the cleaning crew is humming in the hallway at 1:18 AM, I look at the files and see the same mistakes repeated like a glitch in the simulation. They all think they are the exception. They all think that the laws of gravity don’t apply to them because their pitch deck has a particularly nice font. But gravity is patient. It doesn’t care about your ‘burn rate’ or your ‘synergy.’ It only cares about the weight. And these companies are always too heavy at the top.

The Ground Zero Clarity

There is a specific kind of clarity that comes from looking at a balance sheet that has hit zero. It’s honest in a way that a growth chart never is. A growth chart is a promise, and promises are often lies we tell ourselves to keep from being afraid. But a zero? A zero is a fact. It’s the ground. And once you hit the ground, you can finally stop falling.

I once had a conversation with a mentor who told me that the most dangerous number in business isn’t a loss; it’s a ‘lucky’ gain. If you get lucky and scale too fast, you never learn how to build the foundation. You just keep building floors on top of sand. Then, when the storm hits-and it always hits, usually around the 8th year mark-the whole thing collapses. The people who grew slowly, who focused on the principles of rickg energy and their own internal processes rather than the external optics, those are the ones who are still standing when I’m walking through the ruins with my clipboard.

The Art of the Exit

I take another sheet of paper. My signature is getting better. The ‘L’ is more fluid now, less jagged. I think about the next client coming in tomorrow morning at 8:48 AM. He’s a young guy, 28 years old, with a ‘game-changing’ app and $2.8 million in debt. He’ll tell me about his vision. He’ll tell me how close they were to the next round of funding. He’ll tell me that they just needed a little more time. And I will listen, and I will be kind, because I know he’s hurting. But then I will slide the papers across the desk, and I will show him where to sign.

I’ll tell him that it’s okay to start over. I’ll tell him that this time, he should try to build something that doesn’t need a rocket engine to stay off the ground. I’ll tell him that there is dignity in a business that simply works, day after day, without needing to conquer the world. He probably won’t believe me. He’s still hooked on the adrenaline of the climb. But eventually, the adrenaline wears off, and all you’re left with is the weight of what you’ve built.

I cap my pen. The click is satisfying. The office is finally dark, save for the blue light of the copier. 2028 is going to be a busy year if the current trends hold. More people chasing the dragon of scale, more people falling into the ‘Idea 25’ trap. I’ll be here, practicing my signature, waiting to help them pick up the pieces. It’s an honest one. There’s a certain beauty in the wreckage, a reminder that the world has a way of correcting its own excesses.