I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersection of product and finance given my new class on financial fluency. Product managers, whether an individual contributor or a head of product, get lots of advice on how to start a new job: The critical addition often missing is this: If you’re at a startup, you might talk to the CFO. At …
Back in November, I wrote about financial modeling and wanted to pick up the topic again. I think this is very important for lean startups. A financial model focuses your brain on key goals and assumptions. It’s great to obsess over product-market fit, but you also need to take the time to make sure your economics are reasonable as well. …
As an entrepreneur, have you struggled to figure out what your ownership stake looks like over multiple rounds of dilution from investors and employee options? In the spirit of sharing modeling tools I use when thinking about a startup, here is an Excel spreadsheet for modeling out cap table equity and dilution across a number of capital raising rounds. There’s …
Mark Suster of GRP just wrote a post on the importance of financial models, and in an effort to be helpful to new entrepreneurs finding their way around Excel, I thought I would post a business model Excel template for anyone to download and customize (bottom of post). I completely agree with Suster. The one time I told myself “I …
Randall Stross over at the NYTimes recently wrote about Thomas Siebel’s contention that Information Technology’s “glory days are past — long past, having ended in 2000.” According to Siebel, from 1980 to 2000, “All you had to do was show up and not goof it up… All ships were rising.” That is, of course, an absurd statement. Those 20 years …