Training and Capital Don't Mix

The most common reaction I get when I explain that Pertama runs both an AI training practice and a capital backing practice is:

"So you use the training engagements to source deals."

I do not.

I want to be specific about why, because the discipline matters and it shapes everything about how the engagements run.

Here's the asymmetry. The CEO sitting across from me in a training engagement is hiring me to make their organisation more capable. They are trusting me with internal information about how their company works, where it's slow, where it's confused, where the political fault lines are. If a quarter later I show up with a term sheet, every piece of access I had during the engagement becomes retroactively suspicious. Did Michael run the maturity assessment because it was useful for their team, or because he was qualifying us as an investment? Did he ask the COO that question about supply chain because it mattered for the training, or because he was sizing the moat?

Both are now possible. The trust I needed to do the training work is gone.

So the rule, written plainly: I do not initiate investment conversations with an active or recently completed training client. The motion has to start on their side, and a respectable interval has to pass.

Does this mean training and capital clients never overlap? No. Some of the operators I have most enjoyed working with on training engagements have, months or years later, become investment conversations. That is fine, and arguably the most natural way for a serious capital relationship to begin. The CEO has seen me work inside their business. I have seen how they make decisions. Both of us know what we are signing up for.

The discipline is about who initiates, when, and how. Not about whether the same name can appear on both sides of the ledger in time. Done properly, the training relationship earns the right to a different conversation later, but it is the client who decides whether and when to open it.

This is not a polite fiction. It is the operating discipline that makes both halves of the business possible. Training without it becomes a sales pretext. Capital without it loses the deal flow that comes from being trusted, then asked.

Sophisticated buyers — the CFOs and procurement leaders I most want to work with — sniff out the pretext motion within the first hour. If your "training" is a thinly disguised diligence call, they know. They also know that if you'll do it to one client, you'll do it to them.

The trade is straightforward. By keeping the legs separate, I get to be the person who is genuinely useful in the room. Over the long run, that turns out to be the most efficient way to be the person who is also welcome back, in a different conversation, when the time is right.

The Pertama Group is four separate entities for a reason. They reinforce each other intellectually. They do not share a commercial sales motion.