The Distance Between R&D and Revenue
Some R&D cycles take years because the technology is genuinely difficult. Others take years because the operating model around the technology makes them difficult.
In this article, I examine what happened when we stopped treating development speed as an R&D problem and instead looked at the entire path from customer need to commercial revenue. By changing how we validated assumptions, committed capital, coordinated across functions, and defined the outcome, we turned development cycles measured in years into months—at a fraction of the expected cost. The broader lesson: before adding resources to accelerate R&D, understand where the time, capital, and organizational friction are actually going.
Everyone Blames the Cash. The Cash Was the Last Domino.
“We ran out of cash.”
That’s how a lot of startup post-mortems end.
But running out of cash is often the last domino—not the first.
The decisions that actually put the company in trouble may have happened 6, 12, or 18 months earlier: scaling customer acquisition before retention was proven, entering another market before the economics worked, adding headcount ahead of repeatable demand, or committing capital against assumptions that hadn’t been sufficiently tested.
The research is striking. A recent analysis of 431 VC-backed companies that shut down found that running out of capital was a factor in 70% of the failures. But the underlying problems started earlier.
In this article, I break down the four-step operating approach I use to diagnose the problem, identify the real constraint, and determine what—if anything—the company should scale next.