Your Burn Rate Isn’t Just Financial. Here’s the One No Investor Tracks

Founders obsessively track cash burn while ignoring the energy, focus, and will of the people doing the work.

EXPERT OPINION BY TONY MARTIGNETTI

The Friday her lead engineer quit, a founder I was advising had just finished her best board update in a year. Revenue was up and to the right. The product had shipped on time. The team had pulled off a brutal six-week sprint that she’d praised, genuinely, in the all-hands. She knew her cash burn to the dollar and her eleven months of runway, a number she could recite half-asleep. What she didn’t know was that the person who’d carried that sprint had been running on empty for the past quarter, had stopped speaking up in meetings three weeks earlier, and had taken a recruiter call the Monday after. He didn’t leave because the work was hard. He left because no one was watching the other burn rate. Does this scenario sound familiar to you?

The second resource every startup runs on

Every founder learns to track cash burn obsessively. It’s the first........

© Inc.com