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

I think this is very very true. Same goes for energy. Managing energy is essentially managing time.