Down round cutting your draw? Pay yourself a rider’s US$7.10 wage first

A Jakarta delivery founder is two months from a down round, a raise priced low enough that her investors will get to decide her own draw, the salary she pays herself, and how many riders keep their jobs. Her lowest-paid rider earns close to US$7.10 a day before costs, and less than half of that once fuel and phone data come out of it. If your own hard renegotiation is coming, the same question is already waiting for you: whose number sets the floor, yours or theirs.

Seneca wrote his eighteenth letter to Lucilius as December closed in, the week Rome gave itself to Saturnalia, when masters served their own slaves at the table and every rule in the city ran backward for a few days.¹ He proposed the opposite discipline. Set aside a certain number of days, he told Lucilius, on which you eat the scantiest and cheapest food, wear the roughest clothes, and ask yourself whether this is the condition you feared.

He ran the test on his own calendar, while his fortune sat untouched in the next room.

Southeast Asian logistics does not need to imagine the investor-timed version. In August 2025, Ninja Van cut twelve percent of its Singapore staff, the third round of layoffs since 2024, the same month it opened talks on an internal round expected to value the delivery company near US$1 billion, about half of where it stood after its 2021 raise. Nobody at that table asked the staff being let go which number they could survive on first.

That is the whole risk voluntary discomfort exists to answer.

That is the whole risk voluntary discomfort exists to answer.

So she runs the test before the term sheet does. Two weeks out from the round, she sets her own draw to what her lowest-paid rider takes home, and rides a full shift herself: the same routes, the same app, the same fuel receipts. No one else sees any of it.

She is finding out, in her own ledger and her own legs, whether the number her investors are about to name is one her household can survive.

She is finding out, in her own ledger and her own legs, whether the number her investors are about to name is one her household can survive.

Fourteen days in, she holds one number that is hers before anyone else can set it for her: the smallest draw the business survives on, priced against the wage her riders already live inside. The same move works on any renegotiation you did not choose the timing of, a lease, a customer contract, a board’s demand: price the cut yourself, on your own calendar, before the other side prices it for you. Whatever the round decides now, she already knows what the floor costs, because she has spent a fortnight standing on it.

Establish business relations with poverty, Seneca told Lucilius, while Fortune was still being kind.

Establish business relations with poverty, Seneca told Lucilius, while Fortune was still being kind.