A view forms early and then it gathers evidence
An investment team was close to committee on a distributed energy platform and wanted an independent read first. Diligence is done by people who have been living with a thesis for weeks. That is what makes them good at it, and it is worth designing around, because later evidence tends to be read against the view that formed first.
A review only works as an independent one if the people doing it have not been inside the process. Otherwise it confirms the shape of what is already there. The point of a second read is not to check the arithmetic, but to see whether a different room arrives in the same place. So the panel had to be convened cold and handed the question rather than the workstream.
We convened the panel cold and held the material back
We assembled practitioners across development, interconnection and offtake, and put the investment question to them. They saw no diligence findings and no sponsor model. A panel shown a conclusion tends to discuss the conclusion, so the room was given the question and nothing else.
Nobody with exposure to the target, the sponsor or the advisers already engaged was eligible. That screen ruled out several strong candidates, which is the cost of independence and the reason it is worth paying. The full session record reached Nextyn IQ, so the committee could read the reasoning rather than a summary of it. Every expert cleared our compliance framework, and the client’s identity was withheld throughout.
The cold room landed somewhere else and explained why
The panel’s read on interconnection timing was materially more cautious than the working assumption, and it set out the reasoning in terms the committee could test. The investment team stepped away. Walking away with a clear reason is a good result for a fund, and the reason arrived before the closing costs of a deal built on a timeline the market does not currently support.
The practice adopted the pattern. A cold panel running alongside a live diligence became a standing option on larger deals.
