Metabolic Scaling
Burn rate and metabolic rate are literally the same thing.
The question isn't whether you have a burn rate; it's whether your burn rate fits your environment.
Consider your burn rate. Every venture capitalist obsesses over it. 'How many months of runway do you have?' they ask, as if they invented the question. But every organism operates on runway. A hummingbird has approximately four hours between meals before it dies during active hours. A camel has weeks. The hummingbird didn't fail to raise a Series A - it's optimized for a completely different ecological niche. The question isn't whether you have a burn rate; it's whether your burn rate fits your environment.
In Chapter 2, you'll learn about metabolic scaling - how energy requirements change with organism size. The biological mechanism explains why cells have high metabolic rates while elephants have low ones. The business translation: Startups can operate with high burn rates relative to revenue because they're optimizing for growth in resource-rich environments (venture funding). Mature companies can't - they're optimizing for efficiency in resource-constrained environments (market competition).
Business Application of Metabolic Scaling
Burn rate and metabolic rate are literally the same thing. Startups can operate with high burn rates because they're optimized for resource-rich environments (like hummingbirds in flower-rich ecosystems). Mature companies must optimize for efficiency like elephants. The key diagnostic: is your metabolic rate matched to your actual environment?