> Most startups fail because they run out of money.<p>This is one of those pointlessly technical truisms. Well, yeah, of course - it's not just startups; most companies of any kind fail because they run out of money. For businesses, that's really what failure is. You might have some regulatory or personal circumstance that causes a business to shut down before it runs out of money, but usually it's because your business was bringing in less than it was spending and you ran out of reserves before reversing that trend.<p>It's like saying that most sports teams lose games because they score fewer points than their opponents; sure, you might have the rare case where too many of your players foul out and you can't field a big enough team, but usually it's the points thing.
VCs, who on the whole underperform the market and fail to provide returns to their limited partners and investors, seem to think that as a group that have the best insight and feedback in the industry. Singularly, they believe they are the smartest and most profound people on the planet. This despite investing in companies that mostly go under, have down rounds, or themselves face disappearance. All the feedback in this article is trite, obvious, and easy to say in hindsight. Where were these smart VCs in 2021 when it was all about burn, burn, burn and spend, spend, spend? How smart it is to say that if you have 12 months of runway, cutting 50% of costs saves you a year. Where was that advice a year ago?<p>VCs are money managers, managing mostly other people's money, investing in startups primarily as financial products, not as long-term business concerns. Take the advice with a grain of hindsight is 20/20 salt.<p>The net sum of this wise money manager's feedback on how to "manage cash for early stage startups": raise more money (if you can), spend less money (if you can), make more money (if you can), and run your company better (if you can). All that without a fancy four-letter framework.
How can 71% startups fail from running out of time and money[0] but 65% of startups fail from cofounder disagreements[1]?<p>Y'all ever think these numbers are useless and p-hacked to drive a point?<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.codingvc.com/p/cash-management-for-early-stage-startups" rel="nofollow">https://www.codingvc.com/p/cash-management-for-early-stage-s...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://hbr.org/2022/04/how-cofounders-can-prevent-their-relationship-from-derailing" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2022/04/how-cofounders-can-prevent-their-rel...</a>