You run an accelerator. Twelve companies in the new cohort. Week two, you ask each founder to walk you through their financial model during office hours.
Three have Google Sheets — different structures, different assumptions. Two have pitch deck slides with projections but no underlying model. Four have nothing. Three built something in Excel that they can’t explain because an advisor made it for them.
You spend the next hour helping one founder fix a circular reference instead of talking about whether their hiring plan supports their growth target.
The problem isn’t laziness, it’s inconsistency
Most founders in an accelerator are technical. They can learn finance. The problem is that each starts from a different place, uses different tools, and defines terms differently. One founder’s “burn rate” includes payroll only. Another’s includes everything except hosting. A third uses the term interchangeably with “expenses.”
When every model looks different, mentoring becomes translation work. You’re not discussing strategy. You’re figuring out what the numbers mean before you can discuss whether they’re right.
Day one: everyone gets the same starting point
Give every cohort company access to Burncast in the first week. Not as homework — as a structured exercise. Founders set up their models in a working session: current team, revenue (if any), expenses, and their planned funding round.
Most founders complete initial setup in one to two hours. The ones with no finance background take a little longer, but that’s the point. Burncast’s inline glossary defines every term in context. When a founder enters their burn rate (the amount of cash the company spends each month beyond what it earns), they see the definition right there. When they model a SAFE (a Simple Agreement for Future Equity), the terms are explained as they encounter them.
By the end of week one, twelve founders have built their own financial models. Models they understand because they entered the assumptions themselves.
Office hours become strategy sessions
Week three. A founder comes to office hours. You pull up their Burncast model. You both see the same dashboard: burn rate, runway (months of cash remaining), revenue growth, headcount timeline.
No time spent orienting. No decoding color-coded cells. You go straight to the question that matters: “You have 11 months of runway and you’re planning to hire two engineers in month four. If revenue growth stays at 8% month-over-month, you’ll need to raise again in nine months. Is that enough time to hit the milestones for your next round?”
That’s a five-minute conversation that leads to a real decision. Previously, you’d spend 25 minutes getting to the point where you could even ask the question.
Consistent metrics across the portfolio
When every company uses the same tool, you can compare across the cohort. Runway means the same thing for all twelve companies. Burn rate is calculated the same way. Cap tables use the same structure.
This matters during demo day prep. When an investor asks about portfolio health, you can answer concretely: “Eight of twelve companies have more than twelve months of runway. The median burn rate is $35K/month.” Those numbers mean something because they’re calculated consistently.
It also matters when you’re allocating your time. You can see which companies are approaching a cash cliff versus which ones have room to experiment.
Scenarios become a mentoring tool
One of the most productive exercises in any accelerator: ask each founder to create two scenarios. One where their plan works. One where their biggest assumption is wrong.
In Burncast, this takes minutes. A founder modeling 15% month-over-month revenue growth creates a scenario where growth is 7%. The delta-based approach means they only change that one assumption — everything else carries over. Now you look at both projections side by side: “If growth is half what you expect, when do you run out of cash? What do you cut first?”
That’s the conversation that prevents startups from running out of money by surprise.
The real outcome: financial literacy that lasts
The most valuable thing founders take from an accelerator isn’t the model itself. It’s the understanding behind it.
A founder who spent twelve weeks updating their own assumptions, running scenarios before big decisions, and presenting projections to mentors who asked hard questions — that founder understands startup finance. Not in the abstract. In the specific context of their own company.
They know what runway means because they’ve watched theirs shrink and grow. They understand dilution because they modeled different funding structures and saw the cap table change. They can explain their burn rate to an investor because they built it line by line.
When your cohort graduates, they don’t just have a pitch deck with projections. They have the vocabulary and instincts to make financial decisions on their own. That’s the bar worth raising.