FinanceCashflow · Fundraising
I will ask for your runway number in the first ninety seconds
Not to catch you out. Because a founder who knows this number cold, without opening a spreadsheet, is a founder who's actually looked at the business this week.
Delisha Naidoo
Investor Metrics & Cashflow
November 10, 20256 min read3K reads
It's become something of a running joke in the cohort, but I mean it every time: bring a spreadsheet, because I will ask for your runway number before we've finished saying hello. Not to catch anyone out — because the founders who know it instantly are the ones actually looking at their numbers regularly, and that habit predicts more than almost anything else I check for.
Why this specific number, and not revenue
Revenue tells you the business is working. Runway tells you how much time you have to find out if it's working before it doesn't matter anymore. It's the number that should be reshaping decisions weekly — what you hire, what you spend on ads, when you need to close a round by — and yet it's the one founders most often let go stale.
90 secBefore I ask for it
WeeklyHow often it should be recalculated
1Number that should reshape every spend decision
“If you have to open a spreadsheet to tell me your runway, that's not a spreadsheet problem. It's a sign the number hasn't been on your mind this week, and it needs to be.”
The habit that fixes this
Recalculate runway every Monday morning, before anything else, even if nothing changed. Thirty seconds a week is enough to keep the number live in your head instead of buried in a file.
Written by
Ex-VC analyst. I will ask you for your runway number in the first ninety seconds. Bring a spreadsheet.
