RUNWAY0months
The runway calculator
How long can you afford to decide.
Runway is not a budgeting exercise. It is the number that determines whether your next call gets made from conviction or from fear. Know it exactly.
Calculate your personal runway
Everything you could actually spend. Not your 401k.
Rent, food, insurance, the real number. Audit a bank statement, do not estimate.
Partner income, a freelance retainer, anything contractual. Hope is not contractual.
Severance is runway, treat it that way
A layoff check is not a cushion. It is months of decision freedom handed to you in a lump sum, and it is the only time most people ever receive one. Treated as a cushion, it evaporates: a nicer apartment held a little longer, a few purchases that felt earned, and six months later the number is gone and nothing was decided with it.
Counting it in months instead of dollars changes what you do with it. Forty thousand dollars is an abstraction. Eight months at your real burn is a project with a deadline. The first framing invites drift. The second one forces a question: what call are you going to make with this time, and by when.
The number changes the decisions, not just the timeline
A founder with 4 months decides differently than one with 14. The first takes the consulting contract, ships the smaller version, says yes to the first term sheet that clears the bar. The second can hold out for the right hire, the right price, the right investor. Neither is wrong. They are playing different games, and both games can be played well.
The bad calls come from pretending you have the other one's clock. Four months of cash making fourteen-month decisions is denial with a burn rate. Fourteen months making four-month decisions is fear wearing prudence as a costume. Put your runway number at the top of every decision memo you write while it is finite. It is context the decision cannot be read without.
Runway questions, answered
How much runway do I need to start a company?
Twelve months of personal runway is the working floor for a real attempt: long enough to build, launch, and read honest signal before the clock starts shading your calls. You can start with less. Plenty have. But under six months you are not deciding whether the company works, you are deciding how to stop paying rent, and those are different problems.
How do I calculate personal runway?
Cash you could actually spend, divided by your monthly burn minus any reliable monthly income. Sixty thousand in cash at five thousand a month of net burn is twelve months. That is the whole formula. The errors come from the inputs: counting money you cannot touch, or using the burn number you wish were true.
Does severance count as runway?
Yes, fully. Severance is cash you can spend, which makes it months you can use. Count it, then treat it with more respect than a windfall: it is the one time the decision clock gets handed to you pre-wound. The mistake is leaving it in the dollars column, where it reads as a cushion instead of a deadline.
What monthly burn number should I use?
The real one. Pull three months of bank statements, average the outflow, and use that. Not the budget you intend to keep, not last year's number, not the figure with the subscriptions you keep meaning to cancel removed. If the audited number embarrasses you, good: that is information, and it arrived before the clock made it expensive.
Get the Sunday issue.
One essay every Sunday on the decisions that define where your startup and your life actually go. Free.
No spam. Join 58,000+ founders.