Pompeius Paulinus ran the grain supply of Rome, which meant the city ate or went without on the strength of his ledger. Around the year 49 his son-in-law sat down and wrote him a long letter. The letter told him to quit.

Seneca’s argument ran on one asymmetry. Paulinus counted every measure of grain that moved through Ostia and counted none of his own days.

That is memento mori doing its actual work. Remember that you will die, and the counting changes.

This month, twenty-five founders across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam began a three-month Google accelerator that takes no equity at all. Up to US$350,000 in cloud credits each, early access to Gemini 3.5, a residency at Mountain View and San Francisco, the venture clusters on Sand Hill Road and around Palo Alto, and a demo day back in Singapore at the end.

Enterprise Singapore is behind it. So are Komdigi in Jakarta and Vietnam’s National Innovation Center. Since 2018 the regional programmes have put more than two hundred early-stage companies through this shape.

Nothing here is a trick.

Read the terms again, though, and notice which lines carry a number. The credits carry one. The equity carries one, and it is zero.

The three months arrive with no figure beside them, which is exactly why they go unpriced.

You will negotiate the equity line for a week and give away the quarter in an afternoon.

The credits are the cheap half of what changes hands.

The credits are the cheap half of what changes hands.

So price the other half before the acceptance email, not after. Write down the hours the programme takes off the thing in your company that already earns, and the name of the customer conversation that will not happen in September because you are in Mountain View.

You will negotiate the equity line for a week and give away the quarter in an afternoon.

Then look at the credits as a deposit rather than a gift. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of inference is free only if you were going to buy it anyway; if the quarter moves your stack onto a platform you would find expensive to leave, you have been paid in the currency of your own future switching cost.

And name the person. If you can say who you need to meet on Sand Hill Road, and why an introduction cannot reach them any other way, the residency is worth a quarter of your building life. If you cannot name them, you are buying proximity, and proximity is the most expensive thing sold to founders in this region.

The demo day lands back in Singapore, which is where a good share of the region’s cheques already get written.

None of this argues against going. Two hundred companies went before you and some of them are the reason your investors take your call.

It argues for the entry in the ledger.

Paulinus could tell you to the sack what sat in the granaries at Ostia. Seneca wrote to him because the other number, the one he spent to keep the first one accurate, appeared nowhere in the accounts.

Count the quarter before you spend it, the way you already count the money.