The CCVB method is a simple low-scaling approximation to exponentially scaling spincoupled valence bond theory that can separate a system of 2n electrons into fragments with spin purity, provided that UHF can also reach the dissociation limit. One price to be paid for these advantages is a challenging orbital optimization problem: the CCVB orbitals have no invariances to rotations within the active space, in contrast to CASSCF. Hence a good initial guess is very important. Sano orbitals 28 have been commonly as a starting guess for valence bond methods such as CCVB due to their resemblance to antibonding orbitals. For simple alkanes, we examine how many iterations are needed to converge a CCVB calculation with Sano and compare with AB2 shown in Fig. with increasing the molecule size and the basis set size (using the Dunning cc-pVXZ sequence of basis sets ). Since the doublezeta basis set does not involve many high energy orbitals, both methods converge almost at the same speed. Upon increasing the size of the basis set, overly-contracted Sano orbitals deviate more from the optimal antibonding orbitals, and therefore require far more iterations to converge. For this reason, we recommend using AB2 orbitals as a starting guess for valence bond methods instead of the Sano orbitals.