I’ve been helping build startups for almost two decades. And every single time, we would be heads-down building the product, growing the team, talking to customers. Then someone would ask a simple question:
“What’s your burn rate? How much runway do you have?”
And the scrambling would begin. Because it meant digging through spreadsheets, chasing down bank statements, and reconciling numbers that never quite added up. The information was buried. The tools were built for accountants, not founders.
I’d watch founders around me make critical decisions: when to hire, whether to fundraise, how to price, with incomplete financial data. Some ran out of cash. Others raised too late. A few raised too early and gave away the company. The ecommerce operators I knew had it even worse, with their real margins buried under marketplace fees and settlement reports.
The tragedy wasn’t that they were bad founders. It was that they were flying blind.
