Prior to launching Long Tail, I’d begun to forget what it’s like to run a startup.

Sure, I’ve been slogging ahead non-stop with Cyan for a couple of years, but in many ways that’s been a markedly different experience. Because movie production largely works on a project-by-project basis, nearly all of my mental energy has been focused on the details of individual films, rather than on Cyan as a whole.

That’s especially true with fundraising, as – aside from a small chunk of seed capital at the very start – we haven’t raised money for Cyan itself, instead working to align financing directly for the films Cyan produces.

As a result, fundraising is a fairly static, separate phase of each Cyan project. Knowing a film costs $2m, we can push ahead with courting investors until that $2m is in the bank, then switch over to operations, to actually making the movie.

With Long Tail – as with most startups – fundraising is instead ongoing, simultaneous to actually running the company, alongside acquiring and releasing and marketing films. It’s a bit like bailing water from a leaky ship, constantly trying to stay one step ahead of a rising puddle of costs.

That puddle – and the speed with which it accumulates – is known in the business world as the burn rate. In short, a company’s burn rate is the amount of cash needed to fund operations for one additional day. With at least that much in the bank, the startup pushes ahead for another 24 hours; below it, and it’s game over, no matter how well things are going otherwise.

Which is why, as a startup’s CEO, no matter what else your job description entails, you’re first and foremost a fundraiser. You line up incoming investment money, and watch it flow back out, ideally watching it flow ever more slowly as the company’s revenue picks up the slack and pushes to break-even, to the point where revenue alone is enough to cover the burn.

Which makes startup fundraising doubly frustrating; you’re not just concerned about the amount of money raised, but also about the speed at which it rolls in.

Over the last two weeks, Long Tail has signed on another $60k of investments, bringing us close to closing out our seed round. But while that new money is there on paper, it’s not yet in the bank. And without feeling the urgency of burn first hand, the investors behind the cash inevitably take their own sweet time in actually sending out their wires.

So, for most of this week, instead of blogging, I’ve been obsessively checking bank balances online to note any incoming fund arrivals, and paraphrasing Popeye’s Wimpy to vendors – we’ll gladly pay them Tuesday for DVD duplication today.

It isn’t much fun. Particularly because it’s all so very close to working, and yet so very far, all at once. And because letting it stop us now would be a bit like surviving a long open-ocean swim towards dry land, and then drowning in the last two feet of water.

We don’t even need to swim this last little bit; we should be able to walk it. Stand up. One foot forward. Then another. Make it out one little waterlogged step at a time.