Our "11 months of runway" includes revenue I don't actually believe in
Co-founder & CEO of a Seed Climate / cleantech in 🇫🇷 France.
The number I say in every investor call is 11 months. The spreadsheet behind it assumes two pilots convert to paid in Q3 and our biggest customer renews in October. The pilots are real conversations, but if I'm honest with myself the renewal is a coin flip — their champion left in March and the new owner hasn't answered twice.
Strip those three lines out and we have 6.5 months. My cofounder's position is "everyone forecasts, that's what a forecast is." Mine is that there's a line between forecasting and lying about how close the cliff is, and I can feel us on the wrong side of it every time an investor nods and writes down eleven.
Do you quote contracted-only runway and look like you're dying? The blended number and feel like a fraud? Both numbers and look like you can't do arithmetic? Genuinely asking how people talk about runway honestly without torching the raise.
We landed on two numbers, said out loud, every time: "Contracted runway is 7 months. With pipeline we're modeling 12." Nobody flinched. One partner told me it was the first runway answer that week she didn't have to mentally discount herself.
The mechanics that made it work: cash-plus-contracted is THE number internally — hiring plan, burn decisions, everything keys off it. The blended number never goes in the deck as "runway"; pipeline lives on its own slide as upside with close probabilities next to each line. And the day you stop believing a renewal, it leaves the base case — we cut a "90% sure" renewal in week two of our raise and said so in the next update. That one move bought more credibility than the rest of the deck combined.
The investors who are scared off by an honest 7 are exactly the ones who'd panic at the first flat month after wiring. Cheaper to lose them now.