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by nowherebeen 1224 days ago
This summer is going to be brutal for non-revenue generating startups (which is most of them). Assuming their last raise was last summer, they usually only have 18 months of runway before they run out of money. I don't think any of them can raise and even if they can, their valuation will take a significant hit.
2 comments

Protocol Labs certainly has several years of runway.
I'm always surprised how often people naively talk about "runway" when looking at the health of a startup (or any company).

These arguments always presuppose that the reason companies exist is to keep people employed, and thus 'runway' assumes they can keep doing that is for N years.

But runway is a more or less meaningless piece of information unless you're looking at just a few months and have to close shop soon.

Whether a startup or a publicly traded company, you only invest because you think that runway most certainly ends in a massive reward for you. The claim that "hey we can keep existing for N months!" is not interesting to investors. Even if a startup has 10 years of cash on hand, if they aren't showing the potential for rapid growth, especially when investors are less interested in risk, they're still going to die.

The runway is for takeoff, not landing. When you run out of runway you crash. If you’re still talking about runway, you haven’t taken off yet.
As the saying goes, they may have enough runway but do they have enough to take off?
Not a good time to raise
I always wondered how VC funding works in the land of make believe