This is one of those pointlessly technical truisms. Well, yeah, of course - it's not just startups; most companies of any kind fail because they run out of money. For businesses, that's really what failure is. You might have some regulatory or personal circumstance that causes a business to shut down before it runs out of money, but usually it's because your business was bringing in less than it was spending and you ran out of reserves before reversing that trend.
It's like saying that most sports teams lose games because they score fewer points than their opponents; sure, you might have the rare case where too many of your players foul out and you can't field a big enough team, but usually it's the points thing.
Deploying money in a way that generates returns is way harder than getting it.
Using your sports analogy, it would be like a coach getting the attention of a bunch of hotshots to improve defense by telling them they need their opponents to score fewer points to win.
Cash management is obviously important but it isn't going to save your startup. If there isn't product market fit, competent leadership, good engineering, marketing, sales and the rest then you are done either way.
It's obviously problematic, but if the problems introduced by not solving the underlying issue are better than the problems you're currently dealing with, it might be a better way to move forward for awhile.
At the very least it could help refocus a struggling founder; stop writing so many blog posts and start taking direct steps to address the biggest threat, running out of money.
As you can see from the article, you can put a specific focus on improving your cash position making it less likely to run out of money.
Y'all ever think these numbers are useless and p-hacked to drive a point?
[0]: https://www.codingvc.com/p/cash-management-for-early-stage-s...
[1]: https://hbr.org/2022/04/how-cofounders-can-prevent-their-rel...
VCs are money managers, managing mostly other people's money, investing in startups primarily as financial products, not as long-term business concerns. Take the advice with a grain of hindsight is 20/20 salt.
The net sum of this wise money manager's feedback on how to "manage cash for early stage startups": raise more money (if you can), spend less money (if you can), make more money (if you can), and run your company better (if you can). All that without a fancy four-letter framework.
