Microsoft Excel, every mention
58 scenes · ← back to Microsoft Excel
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ted Seides 4David Lyon 4Jose Feliciano 3Jen Birmingham 3Stan Miranda 2Ryan Lovell 2Michael Rees 2Mark Baumgartner 2Josh Kopowitz 2Jace Auby 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft Excel comes up
Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511)
- ▶ 17:05 Frank Danieli Excel's out the window.
Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508)
- ▶ 19:33 Nicholas (Nick) Csicsko This manager specifically was very open about sharing his whole portfolio to the extent that he would just, he still does, sends his entire portfolio in an Excel file to me monthly because he doesn't have any concerns about what we would…
Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499)
- ▶ 41:06 Alex Sloane In Microsoft Excel, every roll-up looks easy, but in reality, operations are hard.
Ryan Lovell – Chainlink: The Infrastructure Pipes for Multi-Chain Finance (EP.491)
- ▶ 4:43 Ryan Lovell Discounted cash flows, Excel sheets, CAPM, pricing models. 2 times in the scene
Year in Review 2025 (EP.478)
- ▶ 34:54 Ted Seides Most people track it on an Excel spreadsheet.
Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476)
- ▶ 39:51 Josh Wolfe Google, 20 years ago, looked at Microsoft's main cash cow of Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Outlook, and they gave it all away for free, because they could, because they have this advertising model in search.
David Lyon – Hybrid Capital Solutions for Private Assets (EP.471)
- ▶ 10:32 David Lyon 30 years ago, we didn't have Excel.
- ▶ 14:09 David Lyon The barrier to entry was, could you figure out Excel?
- ▶ 51:16 David Lyon Just sitting in Excel saying, well, if margins got better, I don't think that's a good way to scale a fund and go through life.
- ▶ 54:18 David Lyon And it's not just, well, I took an Excel
Dave Thornton – Unlocking Venture Access Through Stock Options at Vested (EP.469)
- ▶ 2:09 Dave Thornton I was the nexus between technology and trading, so I built out the risk models and the trading models, and I automated as much of the back office machinery as I could, given that everything was Excel-based, so there were limits, but that…
Josh Koplewicz – Flexible Capital and Creative Structures at Thayer Street (EP.451)
- ▶ 5:38 Josh Kopowitz I was not someone that had been in warden doing Excel classes. 2 times in the scene
Jon Madorsky – Navigating the Evolution of Private Equity Secondaries (EP.448)
- ▶ 28:56 Jon Madorsky It might not be able to fine tune or drive a lot of the assumptions that we need the qualitative rich data that we're collecting, but to actually create and populate the Excel model is something that I can absolutely imagine AI using.
Year in Review 2024 (EP.424)
- ▶ 29:19 Ted Seides And so that went from an Excel spreadsheet to an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet. 2 times in the scene
David Breazzano - High Yields and Low Risk at Polen Capital (EP.405)
- ▶ 50:27 Dave Brizano He said, in this business, you got to read everything that's public that you can get your arms on, and when you write a memo, make sure it's grammatically correct, you do a spreadsheet, and this was hand spreadsheets before Excel,
Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404)
Rob Small and Anil Seetharam - Public Equity Adjacent to Private Equity at Stockbridge (EP.397)
- ▶ 52:02 Anil Seetharam Excel-based valuation methodology doesn't really capture the full distribution of outcomes.
Graham Weaver – People-Driven Private Equity at Alpine (EP.391)
- ▶ 12:48 Graham Weaver And it ended up just being you're sitting in a cubicle and you're working on Excel and you did that till two o'clock in the morning.
Brett Barakett - Digging for the Puck at Tremblant Capital (EP.386)
- ▶ 42:43 Brett Barakett You can have all the tools and, you know, everybody knows how to build an Excel spreadsheet and do a DCF and overlay a Michael Porter analysis and, okay, I'll get some data sciences work.
Shiloh Bates – CLO Investing at Flat Rock Global (EP.379)
- ▶ 47:33 Shiloh Bates So I think the two biggest people are going to be the two people on HR who took an Excel spreadsheet with a hundred names on it of people from different universities and decided which industries they were going to cover.
Michael Leffell – Opening Doors to Niche Private Opportunities at 10 East (EP.373)
- ▶ 36:22 Michael Leffell He could take the data and give it to me in an Excel format if that's what I wanted.
Sanjay Ayer – Think Different and Get Better at WCM (EP.366)
- ▶ 47:50 Sanjay Ayer Think Evernote journals, Excel spreadsheets, who knows, sticky notes.
Gary Sernovitz - Inside the CIO Seat (EP.357)
- ▶ 19:16 Gary Sernovitz Of just feeling like you can master this as something that should be able to fit into the Excel formula, making these capital decisions, which obviously is not something that if Excel had a formula, it would make everyone's life a lot…
- ▶ 22:12 Gary Sernovitz And then hunger is the one that probably the Excel formula doesn't get right, and probably one of the hardest things to do for people in a CIO seat is these natural life of a money management firm.
Jenn Birmingham – Organizational Alpha at PRINCO (EP. 336)
- ▶ 35:06 Jen Birmingham Many folks might still be in the Excel world where you use Excel as a database, but Excel is actually a calculation engine. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 57:28 Jen Birmingham If someone didn't, I would say that having all your facts, I can go back to when I was trying to influence Andy and the senior team to automate what they really held as this Excel spreadsheet of performance.
Stan Miranda – Modern Endowment Model at Partners Capital (EP.334)
- ▶ 14:11 Stan Miranda And we got our Excel turned into more institutional technology and so forth.
- ▶ 39:37 Stan Miranda You just pull out an Excel spreadsheet, you put in what you paid for it in terms of multiples on earnings, and what you're likely to get for it when you sell it,
Don Mullen –Single-Family Rentals at Pretium (Capital Allocators, EP.324)
- ▶ 1:04:08 Don Mullen He got me on the payroll at First Boston as the assistant to the secretary named Louise, and I actually whited out things on spreadsheets and typed them in because we didn't have Excel back then, and then would take him to the photocopier,…
Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320)
Richard Craib – Crowdsourcing Data Science for Returns at Numerai (Capital Allocators, EP.314)
- ▶ 15:42 Richard Craib So you can imagine opening that in Excel or something and looking at each of the features, but the feature names are hidden.
Dan Ivascyn – Fixed Income in the Limelight Again (Capital Allocators, EP.298)
- ▶ 46:57 Dan Ivascyn I think it was easier for people like myself, Scott Simon, others in the business to do that back in the old days when you were pricing bonds on an Excel spreadsheet, when Bloomberg had these primitive functions where you're typing in…
José E. Feliciano – Flexible Private Market Investing at Clearlake (Capital Allocators, EP. 297)
- ▶ 9:16 Jose Feliciano As I mentioned before, if you learned about business behind an Excel spreadsheet where in Excel, almost everything is possible. 3 times in the scene
Michael Rees – Inside GP Stakes at Dyal Capital (Capital Allocators, EP.278)
- ▶ 55:50 Michael Rees At an early age or early part of my career, I thought everything came out of Excel. 2 times in the scene
Chris Dixon – Frameworks and Investing at Scale (EP.258, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.05)
- ▶ 14:14 Chris Dixon And like Excel and Word are still very popular products after 40 years.
Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234)
- ▶ 36:55 Aydin Senkut So many people think that just because they have the degree, they have the title, they have the idea that the deal and the win is going to fall into their lap, and the founders, they are putting their life into this, they don't want to…
Chris Douvos – The LP's Perspective from Ahoy Capital, Venture is Eating the Investment World 2 (Capital Allocators, EP.230)
- ▶ 17:37 Chris Douvos I always think there's, you can invest pre-Excel or post-Excel, EX-CEL, the, the software package.
Brian Higgins - King Street Capital (Manager Meeting, EP. 21)
- ▶ 36:12 Brian Higgins So we used to fax our daily trades to the bookkeeper, and then we kept internally on Excel spreadsheets that I built our positions.
Ashby Monk – Innovation in Institutional Portfolios (Capital Allocators, EP.196)
- ▶ 44:28 Ashby Monk Not like having 40 Excel spreadsheets, but an elegant framework for helping a chief investment officer
Innovation in Private Markets 3: Sulaiman Alderbas – A Massive Restart at PIFSS (Capital Allocators, EP.194)
- ▶ 18:22 Sulaiman Alderbas So we created an Excel sheet for every single line item in the AT.
BONUS – Michael Mauboussin on the Decision Education Podcast
- ▶ 33:33 Michael Mauboussin You can, you could do this in Excel very quickly.
Shane Parrish – Learning to Learn at Farnam Street (Capital Allocators, EP.164)
- ▶ 49:10 Shane Parrish And I think that the world is just really rich and detailed and there are structured approaches to decision-making and a lot of people use decision trees and they complicated Excel sheets, but all
Morgan Housel – The Psychology of Money (Capital Allocators, EP.155)
- ▶ 50:10 Morgan Housel They make them at the dinner table with their spouse, with their family, where all these emotions and nuance comes into play that moves the needle in a way that you can't really summarize neatly in Excel.
Matthew Granade – Inside Data Science at Point72 (First Meeting, EP.22)
- ▶ 20:24 Matthew Granade How much technical acumen a team has, and so we have a lot of teams that have analysts that are fairly technical, and those teams plug directly into our databases and things like that, and can pull the data into Excel models and manipulate…
Clarke Futch – Healthcare Royalty Partners (First Meeting, EP.20)
- ▶ 46:51 Clark Futch So that's a case where we're trying to get, it's not a Excel spreadsheet, but we're trying to get a little more exposure to those areas.
Mark Baumgartner – Allocating in a Crisis at IAS (Capital Allocators, EP.128)
- ▶ 11:34 Mark Baumgartner I think something came through on, uh, learning Excel skills. 2 times in the scene
Dan Rasmussen – Private Equity Risk and Public Equity Opportunity at Verdad Advisers (First Meeting, EP.15)
- ▶ 9:13 Dan Rasmussen I couldn't do Excel models.
Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114)
- ▶ 22:18 Anne Martin There were a lot of Excel spreadsheets with our historical performance, none of which I was certain didn't have fat finger errors in them.
Scott Kupor - Andreessen Horowitz (First Meeting EP.07)
- ▶ 12:28 Scott Kupor And so the time it takes obviously to give them the feedback and allow them to fix it in a way that makes sense versus you just basically going into the Excel model and changing it.
Sam Sicilia – Seizing on a Long Time Horizon at HostPlus (EP.103)
- ▶ 11:07 Sam Sicilia Term, and you had the CEO literally firing up Excel, building their own models, and they had recognized that the time had come to consider bringing in some expertise.
Matt Botein – Flexible Investing and Institutional Challenges (Capital Allocators, EP.88)
- ▶ 13:12 Matt Botein And I had done strategy consultant Excel, which is a different language.
Donna Snider – Inside the Investment Process at the Kresge Foundation (Capital Allocators, EP.84)
- ▶ 23:01 Donna Snider Some like a rigorous Excel analysis. 2 times in the scene
Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72)
- ▶ 21:37 Ted Seides And were you using just hardcore Excel in front of a computer?
Anthony Scaramucci – It's Called a Mooch (Capital Allocators, EP.60)
- ▶ 8:09 Anthony Scaramucci So I was an investment banking associate in the real estate department, and so that was basically being a glorified analyst, so you had to know spreadsheets, you had to know macros on Lotus one, two, three, and then there was a new…
Basil Qunibi - Moneyball for Allocators (Capital Allocators, EP.42)
- ▶ 10:29 Basil Qunibi When you're analyzing a company, you're gonna go through the 10 Q's and the 10 K's, and you're gonna pull down the financials, and you're gonna start building models in Excel and things like that.
- ▶ 18:50 Basil Qunibi There was an Excel problem that I couldn't solve.
Chatri Sityodtong – Warrior Spirit (Capital Allocators, EP.22)
- ▶ 11:33 Chatri Sityodtong Um, and I had a spreadsheet, Excel spreadsheet on my laptop, uh, you know, in my dorm room and, um, it's four dollars and 13 cents.