Burn Rate

The burn rate represents the speed at which an unprofitable company consumes its cash reserves. In the case of a startup company, it is the rate at which a new company is spending its venture capital to finance overhead before generating positive cash flow from operations. Thus, it is a measure of negative cash flow.

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How Elon Musk thinks about the relationship between Time and Money:

“Elon would always be at work on Sunday, and we had some chats where he laid out his Philosophy,” said Kevin Brogan, an early SpaceX employee.

“He would say that everything we did was a function of our burn rate and that we were burning through a hundred thousand dollars per day.

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He would place this urgency that he expected the revenue in ten years to be ten million dollars a day and that every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that money.”