The money lands on a Tuesday. There’s a small ceremony to it — the announcement, the LinkedIn post, a dinner somewhere slightly too expensive. By Thursday it’s a number in an account, and the number has started going down.
Nobody talks much about what follows — call it month one to month nine of a fresh raise — so we will: it’s the most expensive stretch in the life of a company, and most of the expense is invisible. Not the salaries. The waiting.
Runway arithmetic
Say the round bought you eighteen months. The plan reads: build the engineering team, ship the product, hit the numbers, raise again. Perfectly reasonable. Now do the arithmetic on step one.
A senior engineer in London is a three-month search if you’re lucky and you already know how to run one. The good ones are employed, so add a notice period — a month, often three. Then onboarding, then the quiet quarter every new team spends working out how to work with itself. If the first genuinely useful release ships inside month six, you’ve done well. That’s a third of the runway spent before the product has touched a customer — and every week of it was payroll, rent, and a board update where engineering is one green square labelled hiring.
None of which makes hiring wrong. If software is what your company is — not what it uses, what it is — you should be building an in-house team, and you should start now. But “should build one” and “should wait for one” are different sentences, and conflating them is how eighteen months becomes eleven.
The false-start tax
The other classic move in the window is the cheap sprint. Get a low quote, get moving, sort it out later. We take over enough of those builds to have earned an opinion, and we’ve written down how those takeovers run. The short version: the cheapest quote is priced for the demo, not the product. The gap between the two surfaces at the worst possible time — real users, real data, a launch date with commercial consequences attached.
When it goes sideways, the invoice isn’t the loss. The quarter is. Invoices can be argued down; quarters don’t come back. And in the window, the quarter is the scarce resource — the raise bought you a fixed number of them, and the market doesn’t pause while you re-run a procurement decision you thought was closed.
We’d say this part gently to anyone, client or not: if a quote looks like a bargain against every other quote on the table, the difference is somewhere in the deliverable. It always is.
What month zero is for
The teams that spend the window well do a handful of unglamorous things before anyone types.
They write the spec they’re convinced they don’t need. Not a hundred pages — a few decisions, made in ink: who the product is for, what v1 refuses to do, what has to be demonstrably true by the next raise. Half the value is the arguments it forces in week one instead of month five.
They decide who owns delivery, by name, before deciding who writes code. Ownership isn’t a methodology or a tool; it’s a person whose weekend is ruined if the date slips. If no such person exists, the founder has just inherited a second job.
And they run the tracks in parallel rather than in sequence: a senior team shipping from week one, while the in-house hiring happens at the pace good hiring actually takes. Done properly, the first employees arrive into a codebase with tests, documentation, and momentum — instead of a blank repository and a deadline that’s already historical. The best onboarding gift you can give an in-house team is a product that exists.
There’s a version of this essay that closes with something rousing about urgency. That isn’t quite the point — panic spends the window even faster than patience does. The point is only that the window is priced, whether or not you’re watching the meter.
Runway is measured in months and spent in weeks.