[davidu]

If you are burning $500,000/month, which is not unreasonable, then you get 10 months with $5mm.

If you haven't turned the corner after 5 months, you know you won't get out of the hole before you run out of cash.

Therefore, you sell the company and reduce your burn as much as possible to make a sale happen.

If your sale is all about talent and not the technology there is almost no due diligence required and a deal can happen quickly, in about a month.

[jack7890]

It's not unreasonable for drop.io to burn $500k/mo? I run a ten-man startup and I can't fathom burning that much.

[teaspoon]

Do you host an unlimited number of 100MB files, indefinitely, for an unlimited number of non-paying users?

[kaens]

No, but if I did, I'm fairly certain I could do it for less than $500,000/mo, assuming I can do something like "once your file has been hosted without being downloaded for more than x amount of time, users will get a link sent to an email a few hours or so after requesting the file".

Some tuning on that, and I'm fairly certain you could run things for less than $500,000k a month -- most files are probably uploaded, downed a few times in a week or two by a select number of people, and then forgotten.

Then again, and this is key here, I have not tried this. It's also something that could be difficult to patch into codebase if it wasn't considered early -- we're all familiar with the problem of coding ourselves into corners, especially when time is on the table.

[forsaken]

You pay people less than 50k/mo?

[jemfinch]

If he doesn't, I'm working for the wrong company.