Early-stage campus ventures rarely die because their concepts are absurd; they usually die because two numbers were fantasy. The available cash runway looks generous on a spreadsheet, and the expected speed of customer payments looks optimistic in a pitch deck. Reality compresses one and stretches the other, until the gap becomes lethal.
Behind the slogans about disruption sits basic corporate finance. Student founders underestimate burn rate, ignore working capital needs, and conflate “intent to try” with revenue recognition. Procurement cycles, compliance checks and accounts payable queues move according to institutional inertia, a kind of organizational entropy that resists classroom timelines. What feels like product–market fit in a demo week often stalls in legal review, budgeting committees and vendor onboarding.
The result is a structural mismatch between metabolic rate and nutrient flow: operating expenses accelerate while cash inflows lag by several billing cycles. Without precise modeling of liquidity risk and customer conversion latency, even disciplined teams misprice survival time. The idea may be sound, the technology competent, but misreading those two brutally simple numbers quietly decides whether the experiment ends in a pivot or in liquidation.
