There's one spreadsheet in the studio that nobody opens for fun. It has a tab called "Runway", and this week I sat with it for an entire afternoon.
Runway is the unglamorous word for how long we can keep doing this before the money says stop. We've always had a rough sense of it. A rough sense is fine when you're building. It's much less fine when you're waiting on other people's calendars and the answer to "how long can we wait?" actually matters.
So I did the thing I'd been putting off. I went line by line through what we spend, what we've got, and what happens if the next few months look exactly like the last few: no deal, no sudden windfall, just us carrying on. Then I changed the assumptions to be a bit gloomier than I believe, and ran it again.
It's not scary, exactly. It's more that it turns a vague background worry into a specific shape. A vague worry can fill a whole evening. A number with a date next to it fits on one line, and you can plan around it. I slept better on Sunday than I had in a fortnight, which tells you something about how much the fog was costing me.
The surprising part was how much of it came down to time, not cash. Every week we wait is a week of work we have to keep finding sensible things to do with, without touching the big polish list we've promised to leave alone. Waiting isn't free. It just doesn't show up as an invoice.
We talked it through as a team afterwards, and I'm glad we did. I'd half expected to be the only one losing sleep over it. Everyone had their own private version of the same sum in their head. Putting the real one on the table made it feel smaller and made the conversation a lot kinder.
We've set a few checkpoints, with dates, where we'll look at it again and decide what changes. Nothing dramatic. Just permission to adjust before we're forced to.
I still don't enjoy that spreadsheet. But I've stopped treating it like a verdict and started treating it like a map. Maps are allowed to say "long way yet" without that being an insult.
— Thiago, calculator in one hand, kettle in the other
Posted by Thiago Moreira · October 6, 2026
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