Issue #11: Calculating how much runway you have isn’t as simple as you may think. Get it wrong, and your company might be running on fumes sooner than you expected.
You’re Overspending on Marketing
One important measure of marketing efficiency, so many variables to choose from. Your profitability and cash flow depend on making the right choices. In this edition of the newsletter, I’m sharing my first article published this week by Entrepreneur Media. 3 Common Mistakes That Are Inflating Your Marketing Budget Number of words: 908Time to read: […]
Know Your Burn Rate – Set Up Your Assessment Framework
Stephen Blank describes a startup as an organization formed to search for a repeatable, scalable, profitable business model. They are not small versions of large corporations. A well-run startup is like a laboratory, testing hypothesis, comparing actual results against expected results, and constantly executing small pivots until a company is born. Or unit the cash […]
Gross Margin Is Sexy Again
What do WeWork, Uber and Blue Apron all have in common? Two things actually. First, their investors have taken a beating in the past year. WeWork just pulled it’s IPO, and might become the fastest company to ever fall from a $47 billion valuation to zero. Uber, which went public in May at $45 a […]
The Reality Distortion Field Has Only One Weakness
This post is for all of the Chief Financial Officers, Chief Operating Officers, and advisors of early-stage companies in the room. A quick word about managing the budget and cash flow process with the founders/CEO’s you advise. Someone asked me last week how to manage a planning process where the always optimistic CEO is pushing […]
Finding Sustainable Growth Before Your Next Fundraise
David Frankel, a Managing Partner at Founder Collective, tweeted an interesting thread last Friday. His point was that if you pull back too hard on growth to try to get to profitability, growth might slow to the point where you will find it very difficult to get back onto the venture capital path to raise […]