Money
The numbers a young company actually needs to track, and the decisions that follow from watching them honestly. Cash flow problems more often trace back to mundane oversights than to any single bad bet.
Product-market fit doesn’t arrive as one clean number
Product-market fit doesn’t arrive as one clean number. It shows up as a handful of quieter signals — and only together do they actually mean something.
Recognizing when the team, not the product, is the risk
Founders default to diagnosing struggles as product or market problems. Sometimes the actual constraint is the founding team itself, and that is harder to admit.
The advisor who never actually helps
A well-connected advisor with a small equity grant sounds valuable in theory. Many end up contributing far less than the equity they were given assumed.
The invoice nobody remembered to send
Cash flow problems at small companies often trace back to something this mundane: an invoice that simply never got sent on time, or at all.
