Startups & Business › Building the Company

Personal Runway

How many months you can survive without salary before starting.

Also known as: personal runway, personal burn rate, founder savings

Personal runway is how many months you last with no (or low) founder income: savings divided by monthly personal burn. It is the deadline on your first phase — revenue, funding or a job must arrive before it hits zero, because decisions made at month eleven of a twelve-month runway are never good ones.

runway:  savings ÷ (monthly spend − any income) = months to decide under pressure
e.g. savings covering 14 months at current spend → the company must pay or raise by month 10

Extend it before starting, not during: cut big fixed costs (housing dominates), bank the difference while employed, and know the exact monthly number. Founders who cannot state their burn rate are flying blind on the most important metric they own.

The classic mistakes:

• Starting with six months and a hiring plan. Six months covers learning, not building plus learning plus selling. Twelve-plus months, or a part-time bridge, or do not leap yet.
• Lifestyle inflation mid-runway. The apartment upgrade in month three quietly steals two months from month twelve. Lock spending at leap time.
• Ignoring the family balance sheet. A partner’s income, debts, school fees — the runway is household, not individual. Decide together with full numbers on the table.
• Confusing company and personal runway. The company’s eighteen months mean nothing if yours is six. Track both, and let the shorter one set the real deadline.

Revisit quarterly: recompute, and decide in advance what happens at three months remaining (raise, revenue push, consulting bridge, or shut down). A planned ending beats a panicked one — see opportunity cost for the full accounting.