"How many months of runway do we have" is the first question every small team learns to answer, and I think it's slowly making people worse at money.
Months compress everything into one smooth number, and smooth numbers invite smooth thinking. A 14-month runway sounds like a plan. It usually isn't - it's an average hiding a decision you haven't made yet.
What we track instead
- Cash committed for the next 60 days, contractually - not estimated.
- The single largest expense we could cancel this week, and what breaks if we do.
- The date of the next moment we're forced to decide something, not the date we run out.
The second item did more for our discipline than anything else on this list. Naming the biggest cancellable expense, out loud, monthly, changes how you negotiate every contract you sign afterward.
Runway-in-months isn't wrong. It's just a summary, and summaries are for people who already did the work of understanding the detail underneath them. Most of us hadn't.
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