Continuations

It is a common idea that we should learn from our mistakes. In practice though I see many people making the same mistakes repeatedly. I myself have found that it often takes me making the same mistake at least twice before I really learn from it. Leading a startup is about personal growth and mistakes are that opportunity for growth, so how come it is so difficult to do? The framing of “learn from your mistakes” suggests that this is entirely about a rational process. It is too easy to think ...

I am going to spend the better part of today building some models in Excel. Much as I love Google Docs, for any serious model I still go back to Excel without regrets. It is fast and versatile and I know it extremely well. I see a fair number of business budgets and financial models built in Excel. Many suffer from the same set of problems:Artificial precision: often there is an attempt to capture every line item down to office supplies – but those generally won’t make or break a business (un...