You are Vera Iturmendi-Olazábal, 36, two exits behind you, sitting in your apartment in Chamberí with three notebooks open on the table and €180,000 in savings. It is the second Saturday of January 2026. You walked out of Bain in October. You have eighteen months of runway and three ideas. You have two months to pick one.
The situation
You are ICAI 2013, BCG Madrid 2013–2019 (six years), Bain Iberia 2022–2025 (four years, made manager). In between, two attempts at your own thing: a martech B2B SaaS sold to HubSpot in 2017 for €3.5M after three years — your first exit, modest but clean — and a healthtech B2B-SaaS that quietly burned €1.2M of VC money over three years and was wound up in 2022.
You went back into consulting to recover, to think, and to repay your share of the healthtech bridge that the cap table didn't quite cover. You stayed at Bain three years longer than you planned. In October 2025 you handed in your resignation. The runway in your savings account is real: €10,000 a month of expenses, eighteen months of cushion. After that you are looking for VC, a job, or a couch in your sister's house in Lisbon.
You have three ideas. Two come from clients you served at Bain. One comes from an ex-BCG colleague who is now CTO at Sacyr Tech and has been calling you twice a month since November. You have eighteen months of runway. You do not have eighteen months of patience for the wrong idea. You want to choose deliberately, not by which Slack call lands on which Tuesday.
You have read enough founder memoirs to know two things. First: every founder you respect tells you that the first decision — which company — matters more than any decision you will make in the four years that follow. Second: most founders make that decision wrong, because they fall in love with the first idea that thrills them and reverse-engineer a thesis to justify it. You want to not do that. You want to do this with a notebook, a framework, and the smallest possible amount of self-flattery.