Handed a term sheet at 40 times revenue? Price what the extra money costs before you sign.

A term sheet lands in your inbox pricing your company at forty times last year’s revenue. The number flatters you for exactly as long as it takes to notice what signing it commits you to: growing into a valuation you have not yet earned, on a board’s schedule instead of yours.

In 209 BC the Roman general Scipio took the Spanish port of New Carthage by storm, along with a fortune in captives. Among them was a noblewoman his soldiers judged the finest prize in the city, delivered to his tent the way an army always hands its commander first pick of the spoils.

Scipio asked who she belonged to before he asked anything else.

Told she was promised to Allucius, a young nobleman from a Spanish tribe allied against Carthage, he sent for the man, returned her exactly as his soldiers had found her, and added her own ransom to her dowry as a wedding gift.

Scipio was twenty-seven years old, commanding an army that would have called his claim on her ordinary, in a war where Rome’s own soldiers were taking far worse for themselves. The restraint was not an absence of appetite.

Sophrosyne looks like self-denial and means something closer to its opposite: not refusing what you want, but knowing precisely how much of it you can hold before it starts holding you.

The Greeks had a word for exactly this kind of strength: sophrosyne, which looks like self-denial and means something closer to its opposite, not refusing what you want but knowing precisely how much of it you can hold before it starts holding you.¹

Southeast Asia’s venture market misplaced that instinct sometime in the first half of 2026. The region’s startups raised US$7.25 billion in six months, the strongest half-year total since 2022, even as the number of companies splitting that money kept falling. Nearly all of it went to a handful of bets: the top twenty rounds took 89 percent of the total, leaving roughly US$800 million spread across the other 196 deals.

China’s venture market was chasing the same shape at larger scale.

Megadeals took 72 percent of everything raised across Greater China in the second quarter of 2026, with AI and robotics alone absorbing close to 60 percent of that concentrated money.

Southeast Asia’s AI startups alone pulled in US$4.1 billion for the year by August, more than double all of 2025, and most of that total traced back to a single round worth roughly US$2.8 billion. The market grew more concentrated instead, chasing fewer bets at sizes nobody involved had actually tested.

Sophrosyne asks for the arithmetic before the signature: name exactly what the extra capital buys in the next eighteen months, line by line, not what it could buy in theory.

A founder who cannot list where the next US$10 million goes has handed herself a board that now expects a return sized to the price it paid, on its own clock, whether or not the business is ready to grow that fast.

The founders holding this year’s smaller checks, splitting that leftover US$800 million between them, are the ones who can still answer the one question that matters before a signature: what does this money cost if the growth does not land on schedule.

Scipio still took New Carthage, and kept every soldier, every ransom, every gain his army had actually earned that day. He simply declined the one prize whose real price was an alliance with Allucius’s tribe, an alliance Allucius repaid within weeks, riding back into camp with cavalry of his own.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

A founder who prices her next eighteen months before she prices her next round is running the same arithmetic Scipio ran in his tent: measuring what a prize costs later against what it is worth today. Seneca said the same thing more plainly, in a letter about a friend who kept buying books he would never read: it is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.