Scenarios

Most founders build one financial model. They spend weeks getting the numbers right, defend it to their board, and treat it as a plan to execute. This is exactly backwards. A financial model isn’t a prediction. It’s a tool for thinking through possibilities. And the most useful part of it isn’t the base case you built first. It’s the scenarios you run after. The anchoring problem Daniel Kahneman’s research on cognitive bias identified something called anchoring: once you see a number, it distorts your judgment about what the right number should be. The first estimate you encounter becomes a reference point that’s hard to escape, even when you know it’s arbitrary. ...

Here’s a question every founder faces during fundraising: what if we raise $1M instead of $1.5M? It sounds straightforward. But in a spreadsheet, answering it means duplicating your entire model, changing the funding round, adjusting the downstream hiring plan, recalculating runway, and then trying to compare two 14-tab spreadsheets side by side. Most founders either skip the exercise or do it in their head, which is worse. Burncast now supports scenario modeling as a core feature. And it works differently from copying a spreadsheet. ...