Having worked for a startup I'm all too familiar with the term and the implications of it. While examining and researching my own experiences I ran across an interesting tidbit from a long time venture capitalist. His opinion was that the reason most startups fail is because they run out of money before they figure everything out. If this is true then the burn rate is even more important because success often also requires help from outside forces, mostly in developing markets.

By that rationale given enough money and enough time can any startup achieve success? While it's true anything is possible it's also true that it's tough for the creative talent to survive the company identity shift from "really cool idea" to behemoth money making machine. In my opinion this is because people who like to create rarely tolerate or even excel at the day to day operational tasks that are required to make a product or service stable.

So what does that have to do with burn rate? While the transition from idea to workable business plan can take a while it's even more evident that the transition from cutting edge concept to stable platform can take even longer. Though it may seem like all that is needed are a few tweaks, improvements and house cleanings the reality is this: Old code breaks and the folks who wrote it are no longer with the company. The user base grows so fast that scalability issues rear their ugly head. And of course many of the visionaries who carved the initial idea either are promoted to more day to day business roles or flee the company outright.

The point being that though you may have a workable business plan you may not be out of the woods. Surely every successful business came to the point where they realized: hey, we have to hire more people and invest in more infrastructure. Until you have passed that threshold burn rate still remains a central consideration for any endeavor.

Over the past two weeks I've worked on and off at building out our premier replacement web server and slow but surely prepping it for testing trials at the end of the month. Two things strike me about the process. First no matter how well documented the prior build out was you inevitably encounter unknown elements that must be fully vetted and justified. Upgrades are an inevitable part of the roll out processes and chances are the install docs for an application's dependency have become outdated or simply aren't applicable any longer.

The second truth of hardware building is that while it's as much art as science success has more to do with measured steps and exactitude than anything else. I once again find myself comparing the process to auto racing in that building a good server is like building a good race car engine. Performance and reliability are your greatest concern but these two qualities can often be diametrically opposed. Only through diligent research, thoroughly testing and precision installation can you ever hope to achieve and acceptable balance of both under load that you expect.

Of course race engines are not subjected to penetration testing, scalability and other IT centric requirements. Still it's important to craft your mighty server with all the care of a master engine builder. In many ways the server is the engine that drives your application and serves the ultimate goal of keeping your clients happy.

I've commented before on the joy and pain of off peak code promotion duties. That said I feel it's necessary to share my delight of not just staying up late at night but of actually completing the promotion before the roosters wake. After a handful of attempts to seamlessly push code into production we were finally able to do the deed with no unexpected snafus either environmental or self inflicted.

It may seem trivial to those outside the IT field but late night maintenance schedules and manual operations are no laughing matter. Most of the world runs on a 7am-9pm schedule, in time zone, and work outside of those times can often be lonely and tedious as the rest of the world either sleeps or head off for the bar. The truth of the matter is that you should expect little sympathy from loved ones and little more than appreciation from management for averting disaster.

Still I contend that late night promotion can be a wonderful and fulfilling thing when it goes well and more importantly does so automatically. Unfortunately some changes can only be verified by a human and until such time as automated test tools are able to adequately verify everything a human will still have to brave late, thankless hours to ensure that everything runs smoothly.