Keith Rabois: “I tell founders not to worry about runway. Worry about lift.”

I generally tell founders, don't worry about Runway, worry about lift. And, like, actually like the metaphor. Because if you think about lift in, like, a plain context, company's only valuable if you achieve lift. Like, Runway is a tactic for achieving lift. And you may need to extend the Runway so that you have more time to get lift. But unless you're actually achieving lift with that extra time, it doesn't help you. You haven't achieved anything. So I hate, like, when a founder is like, I want to raise this much money because it gives me two years of Runway. I'm like, that. That is stupid. And I usually tell founders this on the fly. I'll be like, that is a stupid way to think about your fundraising. It's, what do you need to achieve? When we invest, we write internal memos about what are the three key risks of this company? So what are the three inflection moments? And you usually can't achieve all three in one financing. It's like, what's the most important inflection? And then everything is derived from how do I achieve that? And so I will often advise founders to let your fuel tank go very low, like down to almost zero. If you really feel like you're approaching lift, don't worry about whether you have 1, 2, 3, 5 months of Runway. And then a lot of founders get very bad advice where it's like, oh, you need to have this much Runway, or you won't be able to raise money from strength and all that stuff. I'm like, that's nonsense. If you have traction, if you hit viral coefficient of 1 with 3 months of Runway, almost every VC in the planet knows how to invest in that company, and it will not be a problem.