When Sam Altman was president of Y Combinator, he advised founders: stay close enough to profitability that you could get there before your next funding round if you had to. As he told the Wall Street Journal in 2014, keeping “profitability in grasp” was a key lesson.
My late Harvard colleague Clayton Christensen would have recognized immediately some of the hallmarks of good money thinking: keep costs low, test whether real customers will pay real prices, don’t let your cost structure outrun your revenue model.
