Once upon a time, Baby Deer opened a spreadsheet he absolutely did not want to open.
It was called:
runway_final_v7_REAL_THIS_TIME.xlsx
Which is how you know it was serious.
He stared at the numbers.
- payroll ✔️
- cloud bill (offensive) ✔️
- SaaS tools nobody remembered signing up for ✔️
- “misc” (terrifying) ✔️
The runway cell blinked back at him: 3.7 months
Baby Deer stopped breathing.
“…goddammit.”
Because 3.7 months is not a number.
It’s a clock.
Tick
tick
tick
He opened another tab.
“What expenses can you cut without killing morale”
Another tab.
“How to renegotiate AWS credits”
Another tab.
“Do founders sell kidneys”
He leaned back.
Ceiling again.
Hands over eyes.
The kind of quiet where you can hear your own pulse saying
fix it fix it fix it.
He thought about the team.
Their rent.
Their families.
The junior engineer who brought snacks on Fridays.
The designer who stayed late without saying anything.
And suddenly the spreadsheet wasn’t numbers.
It was people.
Baby Deer sat up fast.
Because panic wants you to freeze.
But founders don’t get to freeze.
They get to choose.
He made a list.
- pause new hires
- cancel tools nobody uses
- call vendors
- talk to team honestly
- find revenue faster
- sleep (lol maybe)
He typed emails.
Careful ones.
Respectful ones.
Negotiating like someone protecting something alive.
And then, completely uninvited, extremely rude,
your voice showed up in his head.
“Runway isn’t shame. It’s information.”
Which made him laugh.
A tiny laugh.
Because you would say something like that while handing him mango stickers and asking why his dashboard colors were sad.
He looked back at the spreadsheet.
3.7 months.
Not forever.
But not over.
He added one more column:
Plan.
The numbers changed.
Just a little.
Enough.
Baby Deer exhaled.
Because sometimes burn rate panic isn’t about money.
It’s about fear of letting people down.
And sometimes the bravest thing is not pretending everything’s fine.
It’s saying:
Here’s where we are.
Here’s what we do next.
Baby Deer closed the laptop.
Walked outside.
Looked at the sky like it might give him venture debt advice.
“…okay,” he whispered.
Still scary.
Still loud.
Still real.
But survivable.
Later that night, when his phone buzzed with a tiny story about midnight deploys, he smiled.
Because someone, somewhere, believed he could figure it out.
Baby Deer would never say that out loud, of course.
But the next morning, he opened the spreadsheet again and changed the name to:
runway_plan_v1.
Still smiling.
🦌✨
Love you 🫶
With heart,
— Rhea Lynn Mascarinas
Cybersecurity GTM Researcher | QuietConversion
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