Forty-one days

Forty-one days of runway. I know the number the way you know your own postcode. I don't have to look it up anymore; it updates itself in my head overnight like a phone. The spreadsheet lives in a tab I never close. Column B is salaries, column C is the office we can't get out of until March, column D is the software subscriptions I keep meaning to audit and never do because auditing them would take an afternoon and an afternoon is a lot right now. My co-founder Tom thinks I should stop looking at it. "You checking it doesn't change it," he says, which is true and also the single most annoying sentence in the English language. We're in the kitchen of the office at half seven in the morning because neither of us can sleep properly. He's making the terrible coffee. I'm doing the thing where I open the investor CRM and refresh it as if a term sheet might have arrived in the eleven minutes since I last checked. "Anything?" he says. "Kestrel want another call." "That's the fourth call." "Fifth." "What do they want to talk about?" "'Alignment on the go-to-market narrative.'" I read it off the screen. Tom makes a noise into the kettle. Here is what I've learned in the last eight months, if anyone wants it. Nobody says no. They say "we'd love to stay close." They say "let's reconnect after the quarter." They say "this is slightly early for us," which is code for "this is slightly bad." One man in a very nice jumper said "I just don't have conviction" and I nearly hugged him for the honesty. Meanwhile the product works. That's the mad thing. We've got two hundred paying customers and a churn rate that would make most people weep with joy and none of it matters in the room because the room wants a graph shaped like a hockey stick and ours is shaped like a very respectable ramp. "We could do the bridge," Tom says. He means the angels who did our first round. He means going back to people who trusted us and asking again, at a valuation that makes the last one look like a mistake.

"I know." "You said you'd rather shut it down." "I said a lot of things in June." He brings me a coffee. It is genuinely awful. We stand at the window and watch the man from the sandwich place put his sign out. "Forty-one days," I say. "Forty. It's after midnight in the spreadsheet's head." I laugh, which I didn't expect. Then I open the email to the angels that I've had in drafts for two weeks, and I read it through once, and I change "we are exploring" to "we need," because if I'm going to ask I'm going to ask properly. Tom reads over my shoulder. "Send it." "Give me a second." "You've had two weeks of seconds." I send it. The spreadsheet doesn't change. Something in my chest does, a little, though I'm not sure yet in which direction.