"What's our runway?" should take five seconds to answer. For most founders it triggers a half-day scramble across three tools and a spreadsheet that was last accurate a month ago. That gap is a problem worth fixing.
Runway is the most important number a startup has. It is how long you survive at your current rate of spending. And yet, asked on the spot, most founders cannot answer it confidently, because the real number is scattered and the modeled number is stale.
Let us make it a number you can trust on demand.
What runway actually is
Runway is simple in concept:
- Cash on hand, divided by
- net burn, the money you lose each month after revenue.
If you have 600,000 in the bank and you burn 50,000 a month, you have twelve months. That is the whole formula. The difficulty is never the division. It is getting two honest, current inputs.
$600k
Cash on hand−$50k
Net monthly burn12 mo
RunwayWhy the number is so hard to get
The formula is trivial, so why the half-day scramble? Because the inputs move and live in different places.
Cash is in the bank, but the real figure has to account for payments that have not cleared and bills not yet paid. Burn is an average, but it jumps with one-off costs, a new hire, an annual software renewal, a big invoice landing. So founders maintain a model in a spreadsheet, and the model drifts from reality the moment anything changes. By the time an investor asks, the sheet is weeks out of date and you are rebuilding it under pressure.
Live beats modeled
The fix is to stop treating runway as something you periodically recompute and start treating it as something you read. If the number is tied to your real bank balance and your actual booked costs, it recalculates itself as money moves. You do not rebuild the model. You glance at it.
That also unlocks the more useful question: what changes the answer. "What happens to runway if we hire two engineers?" "If this contract closes?" Scenario questions are where runway becomes a decision tool instead of a status report, and you can only ask them quickly if the base number is already live.
Where AI fits
Keeping runway current and answering "what if" on demand is exactly the kind of work an AI finance assistant is suited to. It can tie the calculation to your real cash and burn, recompute as transactions land, and model a scenario when you ask, in plain language, mid-conversation.
You stay the one making the calls about hiring and spending. The number that informs those calls is just always there, accurate, instead of a half-day project you dread.
A tool like Dotio is being built so runway is a live figure you can ask for in seconds, along with the scenarios around it, so the most important number in your company stops being the hardest one to find.
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