The Money Runs Out on Tuesday I have come within two weeks of not making payroll twice. The first time I told nobody. The second time I told everybody. I will get to which one was the mistake. Nobody writes about this part honestly, and I understand why. It does not photograph well. The startup press wants the round announcement, the logo wall, the founder in a hoodie explaining how he saw the opportunity that everybody else missed. What it does not want is a man in his forties refreshing a corporate banking portal at 6am on a Sunday to see whether a wire from Singapore has cleared. There is a particular flavour of insomnia reserved for the founder who knows the exact balance of the company account to two decimal places, and I have never seen it in a pitch deck. Let me say up front that running out of money is not automatically a failure of the business. Sometimes it is — sometimes the market told you no and you did not listen. But plenty of good companies have come very close to...