Spreadsheets

It’s your first week as the finance hire at a Series A company. The CEO sends you a Google Sheet with 15 tabs. “Here’s the model,” they say. “The board wants updated projections by Friday.” You open it. Tab names like “Revenue v3 FINAL” and “Headcount (old — don’t use).” Color-coded cells where yellow means assumption and blue means formula, except on the third tab where the colors are reversed. A VLOOKUP references a sheet called “Q3 Scenarios” that no longer exists. The burn rate on the summary tab says $180K/month. The bank account says you’re spending $210K. ...

A founder I know discovered last year that her runway was off by four months. Not because her assumptions were wrong. Because a SUM range in row 47 didn’t include the last three hires she’d added to the team sheet. The formula referenced B12:B24. Her team list went to B27. She’d been making hiring decisions based on a number that was silently, confidently wrong. No error message. No red cell. Just a clean-looking spreadsheet telling her she had until March when she actually had until November. ...

Three scenes from startup life that shouldn’t still be happening in 2025. Scene one. A first-time founder sits in a WeWork, staring at a downloaded financial model template. It has 14 tabs. One of them is called “Assumptions” but half the actual assumptions live in formulas scattered across other tabs. She changes the headcount in month 6 and the model spits out negative cash for month 4. That’s not possible. She spends two hours finding the broken formula. She has a pitch in three days. ...