"What's more difficult for non-founders to understand is that your company — not you specifically, but a seed stage startup — is in the process of dying. If you don't make money, you can't pay their salaries, you shut down the company, you fail, etc. Every moment you exist without being profitable, you're moving towards your own death. Your job is to take this crazy thing you made up and will it into surviving... That's what you're up against."