The sequence
This week, before the regroup
Fix the cap table on paper.
Dana at 51%+ with documented control. Canadian entity owns or perpetually licenses the delivery IP. Indigenous Business Directory application started. Do not pitch Arrow before this is settled — their first diligence question is who owns what.
Get the cap table right before the first bid, not after.
What people mean when they say it is covered
51/49 so it’s Canadian-owned
What actually clears the gate
51%+ Indigenous-owned and controlled, IBD-registered, with the Canadian entity owning or perpetually licensing the delivery IP
Dana holds majority. The Canadian entity owns the delivery IP. This costs a lawyer an afternoon and it is the single highest-return action available before Tuesday.
Everything below waits on this one. It is the only step on the page that costs an afternoon and blocks all six.
Days 1–14, in parallel
Run one live build for one named nation Dana can call this week.
Their own Final Agreement, their own document holdings, 48 hours, ending with a request for a $35–50K purchase order on the same call. This tests the only three things that matter: does the demo convert to a signature, can this buyer transact without a council resolution, and does the Canadian data gap actually block delivery when the corpus is band-held.
Around day 10
The Arrow meeting.
Ask for the full $200K, structured across four budgets, paid in milestones tied to transactions. Bring the purchase order from step two into the room. A distributor funds pipeline it can transact, not a cause it admires.
Days 14–60
Sell Chapter & Verse into three more of the 27.
Off Dana’s direct relationships. Fixed price, named deliverable, no subscription, and the word "AI" nowhere in the title.
Days 45–90
Stand up the recurring layer where it is legally possible.
Season Pass for Indian Act bands, priced on the funding year. Run one Claim Ready engagement as a margin experiment and measure honestly whether manual Canadian archival access destroys the unit economics.
Day 90+
The marquee work.
Chapter 11 plan acceleration and the northern compute leg. Both need reference customers and working capital that do not exist yet. This is what the October stage is for — not what October pays for.
The window
October
Dana speaks at TEDxVictoria on 7 October 2026. Victoria is a short hop from Seattle and the Microsoft offices there. That is the launch window — but the launch should follow a signed engagement, not replace one.
One detail worth fixing first
The meeting recorded this as a TED talk in Seattle. It is TEDx, it is Victoria, and it has not happened yet. Worth correcting before it appears in a deck.
This is a useful catch rather than a criticism. A live talk that has not happened yet is a stronger asset than one already given — it is a date on the calendar that a partner can be invited into. It only becomes a liability if the wrong version of it reaches a deck first.
Why the order is the plan
The first engagement funds the second.
This sequence is deliberately built so that nothing in the first ninety days assumes the Arrow money arrives. The gating move costs a lawyer an afternoon. The move after it turns two weeks of already-built capability into a signed purchase order. The distributor conversation comes third on purpose — it is a far stronger conversation with that order already in the room, and it is the only step on this page that is allowed to be uncertain.
If the funding lands, it accelerates a plan that was already paying for itself. If it does not, every step above still runs. That is the difference between a plan and a hope, and it is the only version of this worth walking into a room with.