What Cygnetise Learned From Having Two Months of Runway Left (And How Their Board Saved Them)

What Cygnetise Learned From Having Two Months of Runway Left (And How Their Board Saved Them)

The spreadsheet doesn’t lie. Two months of runway. Fundraising conversations stalling. One bad decision compounding with one stroke of bad luck. Steve Pomfret sat at the bottom of a hole that felt impossible to climb out of.

This is the moment that separates companies that survive from companies that become cautionary tales. Not the product launch. Not the first customer. The moment when everything breaks and the only thing standing between shutdown and survival is the people around the table.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Steve Pomfret, CEO and Founder of Cygnetise, a signatory management platform that’s raised $8 million in funding, shared what it’s like to face near-death as a founder and why the investors you choose before the crisis matter more than the terms you negotiate.

The Reality Nobody Posts on LinkedIn

Steve doesn’t romanticize the founder journey. “I don’t think there’s anything glamorous about being a Founder until probably you’ve exited.”

The dark valley came when runway compressed to weeks and solutions felt absent. “When you’ve only got, like, a couple of months of Runway left, and then you’re just trying to, like, fundraise, and then you have these unpredicted without going into detail, one particular instance where there was, you know, you can’t call it bit of bad luck, bit of a bad decision, and it feels like you’re just at the bottom of a hole that you can’t get out of.”

This combination—bad luck meeting bad decisions while runway evaporates—defines the founder experience more accurately than any growth chart or funding announcement. It’s not about avoiding mistakes. It’s about surviving them when they compound at the worst possible time.

The specifics don’t matter as much as the pattern. Every founder faces some version of this. A customer churns unexpectedly. A key hire doesn’t work out. A regulatory change disrupts the roadmap. A pandemic hits. A major prospect goes dark. The economy shifts.

Any single event is manageable. Multiple events converging while you’re already fundraising? That’s where companies die.

The Board That Becomes Your Lifeline

What saved Cygnetise wasn’t a brilliant pivot or a Hail Mary customer win. It was the board.

“We’re really lucky. We’ve got an amazing board of directors who are some of the earlier investors who have all been there and done it. They’re all, like, in financial technology, there’s three of them who have very experienced and have been very supportive.”

The specificity matters here. Not just “experienced investors.” Experienced in financial technology. Not just “been there before.” Been there in the specific context that Cygnetise operates in.

“Without them, I mean, God knows what would have happened.”

This isn’t the board as governance structure. This is the board as survival mechanism. When you’re at the bottom of the hole, you need people who’ve climbed out of similar holes before. People who understand the specific challenges of your market. People who’ve seen this pattern play out and know which levers actually work.

Why Honesty Compounds Over Time

The foundation for board support during crisis gets built long before the crisis hits. Steve’s approach to fundraising explains why his board showed up when it mattered.

“Just being really honest, when you’re pitching and you’re meeting potential investors, seemingly the ones that we have, they like you for who you are and how you offer it, which makes it really easy for you to work with them and then, and get follow on funding as well.”

This honesty isn’t a tactic. It’s a filter. When you’re completely transparent about challenges, timelines, and risks, you discover which investors can handle that reality. The ones who can’t self-select out. The ones who can become the foundation of your board.

“In order to be aligned, the best thing is just to be completely straight up, honest and open, and then you can see which ones that you actually get on with and who you can work with.”

The alignment Steve describes isn’t about sharing a vision deck. It’s about sharing the messy reality of building a company and finding investors who don’t flinch. Who’ve seen messy before. Who understand that two months of runway and bad luck happens to good companies with good founders.

The Investor Selection Framework

Steve’s advice on fundraising prioritizes fit over everything else. “The most important thing is to get investors that are going to help and support you. So therefore, you really need to be able to get on with them. You need to be aligned.”

This framework inverts how most founders approach fundraising. The typical approach: optimize for valuation, take money from whoever offers the best terms, assume you can manage the relationship later.

Steve’s approach: optimize for alignment, take money from people you can work with during crisis, accept that perfect terms don’t matter if your investors can’t handle adversity.

How do you know if you’re aligned? “Just to be completely straight up, honest and open.” Share the real challenges. The extended sales cycles. The messaging iterations that haven’t worked. The customers who showed interest but didn’t convert.

Investors who’ve been through category creation in similar markets will understand. They’ll see those challenges as normal, not as red flags. They’ll commit anyway because they’ve lived this pattern.

Investors without that context will get nervous. They’ll ask questions that reveal they expected a different journey. They’ll hesitate when you need bridge funding. They’ll pressure you to pivot when patience is what’s needed.

The honesty filters for the right investors before you need them to be the right investors.

What to Look for Before the Crisis

Steve’s board had three characteristics that mattered during the dark valley:

Domain experience. All three board members had financial technology backgrounds. They understood extended enterprise sales cycles. They understood regulatory complexity. They understood why two years to first revenue wasn’t a red flag in this market.

Operational experience. “All been there and done it” means they’d founded or operated companies themselves. They’d faced runway compression. They’d fundraised in difficult markets. They’d made bad decisions and survived them.

Genuine support orientation. “Very supportive” isn’t just personality. It’s a function of having enough context to know when challenges are normal versus when they’re existential. Domain and operational experience enable appropriate support.

These characteristics don’t appear on term sheets. They only reveal themselves through conversation and reference checks with other founders they’ve backed.

The Questions Founders Should Ask

Before accepting investment, Steve’s experience suggests asking:

Have you backed other companies in this specific market? Domain expertise matters more than general investing experience.

Have you been through extended enterprise sales cycles before? Pattern matching from SMB or consumer companies creates misalignment.

How have you supported portfolio companies during near-death moments? Get specific examples, not platitudes.

Can I speak with other founders you’ve backed who faced significant challenges? References from successful companies tell you nothing. References from companies that survived adversity tell you everything.

What’s your view on the timeline for category creation? If they expect fast revenue in markets where fast revenue is impossible, alignment doesn’t exist.

When the Board Actually Matters

Good times don’t reveal whether you have the right board. Everyone’s supportive when revenue grows and fundraising is easy. The board’s value shows up in three specific moments:

When runway compresses and you need bridge funding or intros to other investors. Domain-experienced boards have networks that matter.

When major decisions feel impossible and you need experienced perspective. Operational experience means they’ve made similar decisions before.

When bad luck compounds bad decisions and you need people who won’t panic. Having “been there and done it” means they know this is survivable.

Steve’s board provided all three during Cygnetise’s dark valley. “Without them, I mean, God knows what would have happened.”

The Principle: Pre-Crisis Preparation Determines Survival

The underlying lesson isn’t about crisis management tactics. It’s about building the foundation for crisis survival before crisis hits.

That foundation is built through:

Radical honesty during fundraising that filters for aligned investors

Domain and operational experience in board selection

Relationship building with board members before you desperately need them

Clear communication about challenges, not just progress

These don’t help you avoid crisis. Category creation guarantees crisis moments. But they determine whether you survive crisis when it inevitably arrives.

Steve’s candor about the dark valley does something important: it normalizes the experience. “I think that’s pretty common for most founders.”

The difference between founders who survive and founders who shut down often isn’t avoiding the valley. It’s having built relationships with people who can pull you through before you needed pulling.