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A WORKING PAPER · LARKFIELD INSTITUTE

On slow capital,a field study.

A field study of patient venture funding in the late-cycle Eurozone economy, with notes on cycle time, distribution and refusal.

Marit Kovaleva, R. Lansing & P. Adelmann Working paper N° 14 · v.2

On slow capital: a field study of patient venture funding in the late-cycle Eurozone economy.

CONTENTS

In four sections and twelve subheads.

SECTION ONE

Introduction & review.

§ 1.1 · INTRODUCTION

Patience, an operating practice as much as a virtue.

An almanac of slow capital begins, as all such accounts must, with a definition of its own terms.¹ By patience we mean not the absence of action but its considered deferral — a discipline of writing things down before speaking them, of reading memos in silence before debating them, of waiting fourteen weeks where four would once have sufficed.²

The Eurozone venture record offers a useful natural experiment. Cycle times across our panel have, on average, tripled since 2018; realised returns have, against the conventional thesis, risen materially over the same window. We do not propose a single mechanism for this; we propose, more modestly, that the data have stopped agreeing with the older operating story.³

1. Following Kavanagh (2019), op. cit.   2. See §2.3 below.   3. Data appendix, table A.3.

FIGURE 1 · KEY FINDING

withdrawn from European VC funds, Q1 2026.⁴

A SHORT NOTE

The fastest single-quarter outflow on record.

Most of it flowed not to safer instruments but to private credit and direct lending — a structural rotation, not a panic. Cf. ECB working paper N° 412 / 2026.

§ 1.3 · KEY INDICATORS

The board reads four numbers, in this order.

[ KAVANAGH 2019 · p. 81 ]

The fastest investor on the table is no longer the one who reads the room. They are the one who has stopped reading altogether.

Kavanagh, M. (2019). On patience in venture.

Journal of Slow Finance · vol. 12, pp. 78 — 94

§ 2.1 · TWO OPERATING MODELS

Two operating models, ten years apart.

§ 2.2 · A SHORT LIST

Five questions, every Monday morning.

Force written answers, not verbal ones.

§ 2.3 · THREE PRINCIPLES

What we look for, in order.

FIGURE 2 · A STUDY

The longest LP meeting we ever had ran for nine hours.

Nobody left to take a call. Nobody opened a laptop. The conversation that followed reshaped the next vintage. Detail in §3 below.

— field notes · ref. [F-118]

fig. 2 · 4 : 5

fig. 3 · 4 : 5

FIGURE 3 · A METHOD

A discipline of writing things down before saying them.

Our investment committee opens each meeting with twenty minutes of silent reading. A pre-circulated memo, no slides, no shorthand.

— method notes · ref. [M-021]

§ 2.6 · CHRONOLOGY

Eight years of the Larkfield panel, mapped.

FIGURE 4

EBITDA, panel funds, 2016 — 2024.

FIGURE 5

Distributions vs. deployment, panel funds, 2018 — 2024.

§ 3.1 · METHOD

Four gates, in series, no exceptions.

TABLE 1 · PANEL SUMMARY

Six vintages, twelve years, one column to watch.

Fund	Vintage	Size	DPI	TVPI	Net IRR
Larkfield I	2014	€18M	2.4×	3.1×	22.4%

SECTION THREE

Findings & cases.

plate · full-bleed

PLATE I · CASE 01

Lark & Feller — a logistics company that refused to grow.

— PHOTOGRAPH · NAOKO MORI · OCT. 2025 · REF. [P-118]

§ R · ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

An annotated bibliography of consulted sources.

portrait · 1 : 1

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR

Patience is not a virtue you summon. It is a system you build, then defend against yourself every Monday morning.

FIGURE 7 · GEOGRAPHY

Four sites, twenty-three companies.

— sample concentration: every site is within three hours' drive of a partner desk.

§ A · CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

Six authors, six short institutional lines.

§ I · AFFILIATED INSTITUTIONS

Institutions with which the panel maintains affiliation.

§ D · DISTRIBUTION

Three ways to obtain this working paper.

SECTION FOUR

Conclusion.

§ 4.1 · OPEN ISSUES

Four questions the panel has not yet resolved.

§ C · IMPRINT & COLOPHON

An imprint.

This paper is set in Iowan Old Style, with monospace footnotes in SF Mono. It is archived openly at the Larkfield Institute and may be cited in full.