Your Investors' Incentives Are Not Yours

Some of the pressure to spend comes from investors themselves. VCs push portfolio companies toward aggressive, kill-or-cure strategies, and for them that's rational: they hold a portfolio, so one blowup is fine if another company 100x's.

You hold one company. A strategy that's optimal across twenty bets can be reckless for the single bet that is your life's work. 'Grow faster, hire ahead of the curve' is advice; it isn't underwriting.

This doesn't make investors villains. It means their advice about burn rate arrives with a portfolio discount you have to add back yourself. The default alive question is how you do that math independently.