From experience, some things startups waste (a lot of) money on:

- Legal costs (fine line here)
- PR firms
- Enterprise SaaS
- Event sponsorships
- Brand & marketing agencies

What else?

Someone said this to me and it stuck:

"founders think they're time-rich and money-poor but they're actually time-poor and money-rich so as far as possible trade money for time at the early stages"

co-founder stelo.com. theoretical cs phd dropout. into math, music, ml, macro, markets, surfing, writing amandhesi.net

Along similar lines someone once told me “give equity to anyone that will help you get to where you want to be faster”