The spreadsheet that told me to shut down my first company (and I ignored it for 8 months)

Six months into my first company, a simple spreadsheet tracking monthly burn against monthly revenue growth showed, in plain arithmetic, that we would run out of money in eleven months at our current trajectory, with no realistic path to profitability before then. I kept the company running for eight more months anyway.

The eight months weren't wasted on denial exactly — we tried three genuine pivots, each with a real thesis, each backed by real customer conversations. But looking back at the same spreadsheet, updated weekly the entire time, every pivot's actual numbers matched my original honest projection almost exactly. The spreadsheet was never wrong. I was negotiating with it instead of listening to it.

What finally ended it wasn't a better decision-making framework. It was running out of the personal savings I'd been using to extend the runway past what the business could support on its own, which removed my ability to keep negotiating with the math.

My actual advice to founders now: build the honest spreadsheet early, and pre-commit, in writing, to what number triggers a real conversation about shutting down — before you're emotionally inside the decision. I had the right spreadsheet. I just built no rule for what to do when it told me something I didn't want to hear.