[jroseattle]

There are so many dynamics at work when it comes to burn rate. At previous startups in which I was involved, we were expected to increase spending by the investors. While we wanted to walk it slowly, they wanted us to spend more (on headcount.) As was expected, the lesson of ten-women-cannot-make-a-baby-in-a-month was relearned.

[trb]

We had to actually fight our investors to reduce our spending by 50%. We prevailed, and that's probably the reason the company's finally making money years later (instead of going broke early on), but it was a strange situation.

[a5seo]

This pressure is the natural misalignment of incentives of investors and entrepreneurs.

It's a cliche, but it's true: investors want you to go big or go home. Their outcome is binary. The IRR they see gets killed if you take 15 years to exit instead of 5. As an entrepreneur, you may very well make life-changing money by riding it out and making your vision work eventually, but that's not how (most) (professional) investors measure success.

Which is why you should think long and hard before you raise money about whether you WANT to deal with that misalignment in your life.

No doubt, raising money is viewed as cool (viz. entreporn) and may ease your path in other ways, but it introduces certain physics to your business.

[js2]

Nine women.

[aurelianito]

Hey! He was taking into account the overhead of the distributed algorithm ;).

[jroseattle]

Yes, nine is the natural answer. The quote was explained to me in terms of ten women, so I went with that.

Nine, ten...the important consideration is the fallacy of assuming that increasing spend provides a commensurate yield in productivity and output.

The more appropriate analogy would have been Brooks's Mythical Man Month.

[BerislavLopac]

Actually, Brooks uses that quote in the book himself. :)

[jroseattle]

Ahh, good call!

[tomjen3]

If you can do it with ten women, you still win.

[andrewfrankel]

The original poster is correct: human gestation is about 10 months (from conception). Most women would be aware of their pregnancy for only nine of those months.

[aurelianito]

Human gestation is estimated as 40 weeks counting from the last menstruation. Conception is 2 weeks after that on average, so the actual time is about 38 * 7 = 266 days.

Dividing by 30, you get 266 / 30 = 8,866666666667 months (almost nine).

[karmajunkie]

Oh sweet Jesus, you guys are missing the point in style.