Apparently, Zirtual had some difficulty understanding their finances, then hired an outside ‘CFO firm’ to help them, then that firm disclosed that they would run out of money soon enough.

This is a failure on the part of the CEO.

You’re running a startup, not a hedge-fund. It does not take ‘outside consultant’ to know the basic state of your finances. Income, vs. Revenue — and basic cash-flow. All it takes is some BASIC ACCOUNTING — in fact- not even that, just a BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF MATHEMATICS.

Addition. Subtraction.

There is no way on earth that a company should be ‘surprised’ that it’s running out of money. A CEO of a startup should have an ‘intuition’ about their burn rate, finances, revenues, and know roughly when they will run out of money.

I suggest the author ‘faked it’ by raising money and hasn’t had the least bit of responsibility with respect to her organization.

This is a very embarrassing story for the founder: ‘we ran a company, employed a zillion people, but had no idea how much we were spending, how much we were bringing in’. This is not a ‘happy failure’ it’s a stupid one.

Not being able to get traction, dev taking too long, a sudden customer departure, these are all the ‘bad things that happen’ to a startup — but it would have seemed this one was under your control or at least visibility.