A founder waiting on the next funding round and a founder committing a crime can look identical from the outside. Same spreadsheet. Same optimism. Same line to investors: the round is almost closed. The difference between the two is one document – and most founders never write it.

I recently sat down with Torsten Martini for DEALMACHER. He is one of Germany’s most respected insolvency administrators, a partner at GÖRG, more than 20 years in the job, and the administrator handling the German side of Signa – René Benko’s collapsed real-estate empire and one of the largest insolvency scandals Germany has seen in the past decade. He sees the endgame of failed rounds from the other side of the table. And he says the same thing about almost every case that reaches him: it came too late.

Not out of negligence. Out of hope. There’s a line he quoted that has stayed with me: hope is the death of the merchant.

Here is the trap. German law gives you three weeks once you are illiquid, six once you are over-indebted. Founders read that as a waiting period. It is not. Those weeks exist only to repair the problem if you can – not to sit and hope. If you already know the money isn’t coming, the clock is not running in your favor. It is running toward personal liability.

So when are you still allowed to wait? Only when the next round is more likely to close than not. Martini puts a number on it: 50 percent plus. Below that, you file. At or above it, you may keep going – but you have to be able to prove later why you believed it.

That last part is where founders lose everything. Because a prosecutor looks backward. He already knows it went wrong. His question is brutal and simple: you saw the numbers – why did you still think you’d make it? Spoken confidence will not save you there. A memory will not save you.

A document will.

This is the most practical thing Martini said, and almost no founder does it. Write down why you believe the round closes. Put it in a Google Doc. Date it. Send it back and forth with your co-founders and your finance lead, so there’s a trail. Then, a year later, when someone suggests you faked your optimism in hindsight, you can show them it existed all along.

Investors sit closer to this than they think. An email from an investor who is good for the money – I know you need a million in three weeks, you’ll get it from me – can be enough to justify waiting. A vague expression of interest cannot. And it cuts the other way too: Martini has watched rounds collapse because an existing investor suddenly imposed conditions that were impossible to meet, on a company whose numbers had been worse before and were now better. The capital was there. The will wasn’t.

None of this is exotic. It is the unglamorous middle of a fundraise that no one wants to look at, because looking at it means admitting the round might not happen. But the founders who survive are the ones who did the boring work months early – who treated hope as fuel, not as a plan.

Hope gets you to the table. It does not keep you out of court.

The full conversation with Torsten Martini – including the cases that stay with him after 20 years – is on DEALMACHER: www.id.vc/dealmacher-podcast

If you’re heading into a round and the timeline is tightening, this is the one episode to listen to before you need it.