Microsoft Excel, every mention
91 scenes · ← back to Microsoft Excel
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every year anyone Harry Stebbings 14George Sivulka 14Mike Cannon-Brookes 5Kaz Nejatian 5Des Traynor 4Ryan Petersen 3Mario Schlosser 3Thomas Plantenga 2Mike Hudack 2Merci Victoria Grace 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft Excel comes up
Should American Enterprises Work With Open-Source Chinese Models? | Only 10% of Neo-labs survive
Flexport CEO: Two Questions Every Founder Needs to Ask · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:45 Ryan Petersen My, my first Excel, uh, my first and only financial model that I made for myself for the business got to one million of revenue, right? 3 times in the scene
Mercor CEO: Why Application Layer Companies Have No Moat & The Cost of Hiring AI Researchers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 26:30 Brendan Foody It's just like the barrier to automating everything that you can do in, say, Google Workspace is how do we cover the full distribution of all of the context, i.e. messages, slacks, slides, Excel sheets, and all of the tasks, prompts, and…
OpenAI & SpaceX S1 Drops | Layoffs at Cloudflare & ClickUp | OpenRouter & Polsia Raise Mega Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 32:33 unnamed speaker Being an agentic, uh, an agentic expert should be like Excel in 12 or 24 months.
Replit CEO: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified & Why Coding Models are Plateauing | Amjad Masad · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 19:14 Amjad Masad They have a lot of Excel sheets, a lot of manual work.
Insights from Coatue's Growth Investor Lucas Swisher · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 48:19 Lucas Swisher Being able to express a company in a few, a complex company in a few lines in Excel and tell stories with data is like an incredible skill.
- ▶ 50:03 Lucas Swisher Live in Excel all day, and you are like just missing the forest through the trees.
OpenAI's Codex Lead: Why Coding as We Know It is Over · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 7:55 Harry Stebbings That's where I think, like, Claude has done well in terms of the packaging they've done, like Claude for legal, Claude for Excel, where you can implement it and have a DCF model.
Legora CEO, Max Junestrand: $7M ARR in a Day | Harvey vs Legora: Is a Legal AI Winner Takes All? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 7:26 Max Junestrand But in our case, I actually like to think of it synonymous to the way that accountants had to learn Excel or
Anthropic’s $10B Raise | a16z’s $15B Fund: Is the Middle Dead in VC? | How OpenAI Could Go to Zero? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 7:24 unnamed speaker If you're doing all the other knowledge work that those of us who aren't coders do, instead of bringing the AI to the Excel spreadsheet, which is what Copilot tried to do with Microsoft, you bring all these tools into the cloud space, into… 2 times in the scene
Matt Fitzpatrick: Who Wins the Data Labelling Race & Why Al Needs Forward-Deployed Engineers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 47:11 Matt Fitzpatrick Now, Excel comes around. 2 times in the scene
AI Fund’s GP, Andrew Ng: LLMs as the Next Geopolitical Weapon & Do Margins Still Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 22:01 Mike Cannon-Brookes There's an old adage in enterprise software that every single piece of enterprise software can be replicated with email and Excel. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:57 Mike Cannon-Brookes Where previously they might have tried with Excel, or they might have filed a ticket with IT, or they just wouldn't have bothered, right?
20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong
- ▶ 5:25 Amit Bendov And I sent my product manager to sift through CRM notes and they spent a couple of weeks, load everything to Excel.
20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand
- ▶ 1:07:30 Max Junestrand I had spent like six days building this monster Excel model, and there was one number wrong on the first page, which was just like a super sloppy, dumb mistake.
Navan Files to Go Public and Canva Pulls the Brakes: Why and What Happens? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 27:14 unnamed speaker Excel doesn't charge 60 grand a year because it replaced an analyst. 2 times in the scene
Julian Teixeira, CRO @ 1Password: How to Hire and Train Your First Sales Hires · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 15:37 Julian Teixeira And so if anyone's doing Excel math to determine who falls at the bottom, as opposed to taking the time to really evaluate the people as individuals, um, I, I do think you can find some
Fabien Pinckaers, CEO @Odoo: The Billionaire Founder Who Doesn’t Care About Money | E1259 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 19:42 Fabien Pinckaers Uh, everybody uses the same Word and Excel and Slides and PowerPoint and everything.
- ▶ 1:14:07 Fabien Pinckaers Um, after the complexity of operating system, we, we, we were purely technical, came the office with the complexity of user experience, Word, Excel, and so.
Max Levchin, Founder & CEO @ Affirm:The Biggest Surprise Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 14:01 Max Levchin And I don't actually have a full model in Excel or in my head or on paper proving that I'm right.
Nabeel Hyatt, GP @ Spark Capital: To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | E1255 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:05:56 Harry Stebbings I can't work in Excel spreadsheets.
George Sivulka, Co-Founder & CEO @Hebbia: The Future of Foundation Models | E1250 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 11:00 George Sivulka But it's not a product that, like in Excel, that lets you just build whatever you'd like with it.
- ▶ 28:40 George Sivulka There were plenty of people that were tallying things or bookkeeping in actual books, and their jobs changed, uh, and there were apps for bookkeeping, and then there were platforms like Excel that let people build better apps for… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:53 George Sivulka But, like, if you look at finance and how fast, ah, Excel went to 90% market penetration in finance. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:26 George Sivulka But I don't think that, you know, just as Excel didn't end up taking away jobs from people, it just changed people, you know, to having to learn Excel, um, the exact same thing will happen with AI. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:49 George Sivulka I don't think that when Excel came out, um, and then, you know, Mark released Salesforce, and then, you know, people created TurboTax, you know, uh, all these unravelings of Excel, uh, actually were, were produced later. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 49:08 George Sivulka And I think that Hebbia has built, ah, you know, if, if, if Excel was that product for compute, ah, I actually think Hebbia has built that product for AI.
- ▶ 49:40 George Sivulka It's an, it's an, it's a useful interface, but again, it's, it's like a single cell in Excel.
- ▶ 55:50 George Sivulka And, you know, you actually need business people to build the CRM in Excel first, uh, in, in kind of that order of operations.
Victor Riparbelli, CEO @Synthesia: OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai - Who Wins and Why | E1246 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 3:02 Victor Riparbelli Um, so when you used to work in private equity, you're like a financier more than you're a technologist, and this was not a pitch you could understand for an Excel sheet.
Dan Gill, CPO @Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets | E1243 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Raman Malik: Inside Perplexity’s Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | E1226 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 8:49 Raman Malik So, you know, you, you imagine you, you open up an Excel sheet.
Daniel Khachab: "We Are in the Middle of a Cold War for AI Talent" | E1220 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 9:11 Daniel Khachab Not Google sheets, but Excel sheets. 2 times in the scene
AJ Tennant: How to Build a Sales Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | E2118 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 39:55 AJ Tennant If I give you, like, your book of business today, a hundred accounts, that's an Excel spreadsheet on column, column A is the name of the accounts.
Mike Hudack: How Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Build Great Products | E1201 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 2:07 Mike Hudack You know, he'd do a product review on Excel and he'd be like, click on that menu, go down five levels. 2 times in the scene
Aman Narang: 5 Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | E1192 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 53:23 Aman Narang At the end of the day, fundamentally back to like, you know, it's not a business strategy, like any strategy you want, you put PowerPoint together and Excel spreadsheet together as it says, you know, here's a business model.
Kaz Nejatian: How Shopify Built a $90BN Business to Last 100 Years | E1189 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 10:36 Kaz Nejatian They go into some Excel sheet, but I'm pretty sure Excel has done more damage to the world than any other software. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:56 Kaz Nejatian Or in real world, what happens is a CSV export from here into an Excel sheet there to make a decision. 2 times in the scene
Danny Rimer: The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook | E1166 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 18:18 Harry Stebbings As someone who hates Excel is the reason I don't do it.
Jason Lemkin: Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | E1157 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 21:57 Jason Lemkin And the other thing that happens if you run from competition, especially sometimes in vertical SAS, um, because you can find a lot of categories in vertical SAS where the competition is SAP or Excel or paper or like some DOS application… 2 times in the scene
Rujul Zaparde: Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | E1144 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 13:01 Rujul Zaparde Then as we started to talk to more people, we sort of morphed this and literally built an Excel, like a Google sheet and morphed it into ICP.
Girish Mathrubootham: Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | E1142 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 45:38 Girish Mathrubootham A good investor or a bad investor sometimes looking at Excel sheets and not really understanding how to help the startup.
Vickie Peng: Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product? | E1141 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 32:37 unnamed speaker Same thing with, I always use Excel as the example, because Excel is, you know, there's so many different ways that you could use Excel, but it didn't start as a, Hey, here's a spreadsheet, you know, use it for whatever you want, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 45:26 unnamed speaker When I could just have all in one here, same thing with like Google sheets and Google docs versus office, you know, originally it was like, it is definitely not Google spreadsheets are not better than Microsoft Excel, like period from a… 2 times in the scene
Mario Schlosser: "How to Deal with a 94% Decline in Market Cap" | E1136 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 6:54 Mario Schlosser I said, it is so incredible how fast they can build Excel spreadsheets. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 48:13 Mario Schlosser and I know it's bad, most likely, or there's an Excel table, I know it's bad.
Thomas Plantenga & Alex Taussig: Vinted CEO's Ultimate Guide to Scaling Marketplaces | E1114 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 46:35 Thomas Plantenga Then you rank those probabilities of success times the value of the market in a little Excel, and then you have your prioritization.
- ▶ 1:06:40 Thomas Plantenga And we've been looking at Excel files so much that we've seen very great companies with high EBITDA margin, but it doesn't mean that it by itself is a good thing.
Des Traynor: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI | E1082 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:28:00 Des Traynor Like, I mean, simply having a better Excel, you could find yourself just sitting at the bar wondering why is no one paying attention? 2 times in the scene
Chris Degnan: Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think | E1080 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:25 Harry Stebbings You're likely using Google Sheets or Excel for your financing modeling, right?
- ▶ 54:45 Harry Stebbings You're likely using Google Sheets or Excel for your financing modeling, right?
Danny Cohen: From Leading the BBC to Leading Venture Capitalist |E1079 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 30:48 Danny Cohen So my background, I am not going to be the fastest in the room on the Excel, ok? 2 times in the scene
Ilir Sela: How I Founded Slice Pizza & Became One of Macedonia’s Largest Employers | E1044 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Gina Gotthilf: Lessons Scaling Duolingo from 3-200M Users; How to Master PR and Comms | E1028 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:18 Gina Gotthilf I didn't know how to use Excel when I graduated.
Ben Chestnut: Why I Sold MailChimp; How My Kids Found Out I Was a Billionaire | E959 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 4:07 Ben Chestnut We like, we used Excel. 2 times in the scene
dLocal CEO Sebastian Kanovich: The $8BN Company You Might Not Know | 20VC #926 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 33:11 Sebastian Kanovich This is the Excel sheet.
Des Traynor: How I Founded Intercom; Product Marketing Tips; Feature Creep | 20VC #907 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 2:57 Des Traynor And equals basically it connects spreadsheets like Excel
- ▶ 25:13 Des Traynor And if the answer is they're doing it in Excel or whatever, then
Adam Fishman: Takeaways from Lyft and Patreon; How to Build Viral Loops | 20VC #897 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:48 Adam Fishman Um, it basically lived in Excel.
- ▶ 39:38 Adam Fishman So like when I joined, um, imperfect foods as their chief product officer, chief product and growth officer, I built this out in an Excel file or a Google sheets file, I should say.
Ruchi Sanghvi: My Job Interview with Mark Zuckerberg; Deep Dive on DAOs | 20VC #895 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 36:24 Ruchi Sanghvi I built an Excel sheet to figure out my relationship to money.
Tony Fadell: Product Marketing Lessons I Learned from Steve Jobs | 20VC #884 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 39:41 Tony Fadell Uh, for doing mobile, for mobile computing for professionals, like a mobile Excel and email and stuff like that.
20VC: Why Crypto is Software Eating Money, Why Crypto Firms Will Outcompete Traditional Venture Firms, How To Price Tokens and When To Have Them, DAOs: How Are They Structured and What Makes One Successful with Avichal Garg, Co-Founder @ Electric Capital
- ▶ 19:28 Avichal Garg And instead of it being 19 seventies infrastructure and PDFs and Excel and email that is sort of moving all this stuff around, which is, I mean, you've done venture for a long time. 2 times in the scene
Mac the VC on the Journey from Homeless To Becoming A VC | Full Interview with Harry Stebbings · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 24:17 Harry Stebbings I mean, Jesus, whenever I open Excel, it says sign in or register, and I'm like, ooh, don't like this.
20VC: A Masterclass in Leadership and Scaling Companies: The Decisions only the CEO Can Make, The Secret To Talent Acquisition and Retention and How To Find The Unscalable Things that are Fundamental To Scale with Christa Quarles, CEO @ Corel Corporation
- ▶ 10:38 Krista Quarles It was like in somebody's like spreadsheet on Excel or we had never written a policy about anything.
20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function
20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard
- ▶ 20:57 Hubert Palan And just like with Excel, like Microsoft Access, I don't know whether you remember, remember, but you would build your CRM in a spreadsheet or in Microsoft Access, right?
20VC: Accel's Dan Levine on The Current State of Seed & Series A, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Solo Capitalists and Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed & Market, People and Product; What To Prioritise?
- ▶ 10:04 Harry Stebbings Poor sense of skill and judgment around using Microsoft Excel.
20VC: Zach Weinberg on Whether A Company is a Democracy, The Importance of Ownership, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed and How he Approaches Both Risk and Personal Capital Allocation
- ▶ 18:17 Zach Weinberg I would say stick me in Excel and I'm on the bottom end of the spectrum of knowing how to build a model.
20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts
- ▶ 20:49 Harry Stebbings Optional Excel modeling skills, which I have to say did make me very happy because honestly, Excel is not exactly my, uh, domain of comfort. 4 times in the scene
20VC: Lightspeed Partner, Merci Victoria Grace on The Future of Collaboration Tools, Bundling vs Unbundling, Synchronous vs Asynchronous & What It Means To Productise The S*** Out of Venture
- ▶ 10:32 Merci Victoria Grace Depending on the stage, obviously we'll use Excel. 2 times in the scene
20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research
- ▶ 8:01 unnamed speaker So our role model for this is Excel. 5 times in the scene
20VC: Inside UiPath, The World's Fastest Growing Startup, How The Best Leaders Approach Decision-Making & WhY Vulnerability Is Central To SuccessFul Leadership Today with Brandon Deer, VP of Operations & Strategy @ UiPath
- ▶ 11:04 Brandon Deer It's, uh, if I had to put it simply, it's kind of like an Excel macro that runs on a mainframe, web app, Citrix environment, or any desktop application, really.
20VC: Ash Fontana on The 5 Core Characteristics That Make Data Valuable, What VCs Can Learn From Italian Craftsmen and Howard Marks & The Importance of Vertical Integration In Scaling Today
- ▶ 18:26 Ash Fontana They could be running the machine learning model and delivering the results to customers in like an Excel sheet or PowerPoint presentation.
20VC: Former Tinder CPO Brian Norgard on His Biggest Product Takeaways from Launching the Top Grossing App in the World, The Top 10 Reasons Why Products Fail Today & How The Best Founders Assess Risk and Use It
- ▶ 21:47 Brian Norgard It was an Excel.
20VC: Why Startup Founders Have One Core Job, How To Reduce Risk & Increase Probability In Your Startup & Why You Should Not Send A Pitch Deck Pre-Investor Meeting with David Rogier, Founder & CEO @ Masterclass
- ▶ 16:07 David Rogier You know, there's already proof online that people were going to buy classes on how to use Excel, but you know, were they going to buy classes on acting?
20VC: Spark Capital's Alex Clayton on How The Best Growth Investors Source, Evaluate and Win Deals, Why Market Depth Is Crucial When Analysing Markets & Why Capital Is Only A Temporary Competitive Advantage
- ▶ 22:13 Harry Stebbings We want to dig into the Excel spreadsheets now.
20VC: Why Too Many People Give Up Too Quickly, Why You Should Never Start A Venture Without Owning The Underlying Data & Why We Have Over-Estimated The Ability of Automation with Dennis Mortensen, Founder & CEO @ X.ai
- ▶ 19:22 Dennis Mortensen It's kind of a mess, but you can do that in, uh, in Excel.
20VC: Jason Calacanis on The 4 Questions Investors Must Ask Founders, Whether YC Have Scaled Their Process Successfully & Why Early Founder Liquidity Is Good Not Bad
- ▶ 31:17 Jason Calacanis We go there, we sit, we eat some food, we talk about the book, then we walk home, maybe get a coffee, and sit and write a little bit more, go back to my house, and we'd organize the table of contents in an Excel spreadsheet, and then we'd…
20VC: When Should CEOs Ask Their VC For Help, When Do Companies Really Need A Board & What The Series A Expansion Means For Startups with Max Gazor, General Partner @ CRV
20VC: How LPs Can Add Strategic Value To Portfolio Companies & Why Real Estate Is On Every Whiteboard In Silicon Valley with Brendan Wallace, Co-Founder @ Fifth Wall
- ▶ 29:11 Brendan Wallace They are competing with my old job at Blackstone, crunching numbers in Excel and telling my boss what the role schedule is for some office building.
20VC: Sequoia Partner, Pat Grady on Why Data Is The New Oil, Why We Will See The Return of The Apprenticeship Model in VC & The Defining Characteristics of The Next Generation of Great Software
20VC: DFJ's Josh Stein on Why VCs Must Adapt To Their Founders, The Major Transition Points For Aaron Levie @ Box & Why SaaS Startups Are Growing At A Rate Never Seen Before
- ▶ 13:01 Josh Stein We realized that businesses were using it for sharing things like PowerPoint, Excel documents, and that was the genesis of this pivot to the enterprise.
20VC: How To Assess Founder Psychology, Why Talking About Financial Returns In The First Meeting Is Always Wrong & How To Allocate Time Amongst A VC Portfolio with Kara Nortman, Partner @ Upfront Ventures
- ▶ 4:38 Kara Nortman It was, you know, two years at Morgan Stanley, and their private equity group was like a professional education, you know, that spent 8000 hours a week in Excel modeling financial statements, and it gave me a really strong
20VC: X.ai's Dennis Mortensen on Why There Is No Incumbency Advantage in Artificial Intelligence
- ▶ 11:59 Dennis Mortensen A little bit more accurate, whether that is playing around with a data set in Excel, and you create a pivot table, or whether that is submitting your receipts, or creating an invoice.
20VC: Spark's Nabeel Hyatt on Investing in Oculus and Cruise & What It Takes To Invest Ahead Of The Curve
- ▶ 17:48 Nabeel Hyatt I started working on Excel spreadsheets with them about what it would cost to roll out a sales, sales and marketing plan,
20 VC 095: How VCs Find Startups and How To Add Value Once Invested with David Teten @ ff Venture Capital
- ▶ 2:28 David Teten I was earning money through computer consulting and teaching people how to use Excel.
- ▶ 19:29 David Teten And Adapart was started because Joe was setting up a family office for himself and realized that family offices usually run on Excel and PDF and said this is sort of ludicrous.
20 VC 053: Inside Union Square Ventures with Jonathan Libov @ Union Square Ventures
- ▶ 0:48 Harry Stebbings But before we jump into today's episode, if you are stuck in the 20th century using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of all your candidate applications,
- ▶ 28:58 Harry Stebbings Then you simply export the information to other sources whenever you like, or if you need to escape Excel hell, Hiring Screen can help you import information from other files and databases directly.