Microsoft Excel, every mention

54 scenes · ← back to Microsoft Excel

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every year anyone Pablo Srugo 35Didi Gurfinkel 15Siqi Chen 7Don Mal 7Aviv Leibovici 5Rob Woollen 4Jordan Boesch 2Jeff Wang 2Hongwei Liu 2Colin Zima 2

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft Excel comes up

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He spent $150K on brand before he had a product—closed $1.5M ARR in 1 month. | Endra Aug 17, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 20:13 Niklas Lindgren And then they need to ingest that into an Excel file to then calculate, like, how much load do I have on this panel?

He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni Aug 10, 2026 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 4:42 Colin Zima Write SQL, use Excel, do pivot tables, and also enterprise BI and embedded all in one platform. 2 times in the scene

Worked out of a police department unpaid for a year—built a $6.8B company | Peregrine · PMF Show Jul 27, 2026 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 5:00 Ben Rudolph Think dozens and dozens of Excel files, different time zones, messy data.
  • ▶ 16:33 Ben Rudolph I got two free crime analysts who know how to write software and work with Excel really well.

He raised $75M—but kept his team to 21 people & pays everyone the same salary. | Cos Nicolaescu, ... · PMF Show Jul 6, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 11:50 Cos "Kaz" Nicolaescu Not only were the tools not that helpful in terms of productivity, but they required so much manual work from like admin staff to go in and out of those tools, import and export and transform data, put it in Excel, resave it.

He hit $1M ARR by sending 500,000 cold emails—then raised a $25M Series A in 6 days. | Mark Hughe... · PMF Show Jun 1, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 40:51 Mark Hughes So I just had, like, the data room ready in Docsend, like, our, like, head of operations and finance, like, like, he's a wizard with Excel, something that I'm not the best at.

How this 1st-time founder went from closing customers for $500 a month to $300,000 a year. | Sean... · PMF Show May 4, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 25:17 Sean McCarthy What we see is that historically, maybe they're pulling down an Excel spreadsheet, doing some sort of manipulation, and uploading it somewhere else, where obviously

She raised $20M from Accel to replace QuickBooks with AI. | Helen Hastings, Founder of Quanta · PMF Show Mar 19, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 10:17 Helen Hastings These are called month-close workbooks, which are always an Excel sheet living on, on someone's laptop with a lot of tabs.

He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show Feb 26, 2026 · 29 mentions

  • ▶ 3:53 Didi Gurfinkel Let's try to connect all the organizational Excel files, all the organizational spreadsheets into one centralized database. 4 times in the scene
  • ▶ 6:21 Pablo Srugo Maybe what was the first kind of use case, the first idea that what you wanted to solve, you know, out of Excel? 13 times in the scene
  • ▶ 14:39 Didi Gurfinkel They take data from one system, export to Excel, take it from another system, export to Excel, and when the data joined together, now they have something that they couldn't see before, and it was 10 times in the scene
  • ▶ 18:46 Pablo Srugo To that point, because there are others you mentioned before, nobody wants to leave Excel and there are FP&A tools that try to get people to leave Excel, but there are others.
  • ▶ 33:47 Didi Gurfinkel So all the rest are using Excel.

How I grew my AI startup to $3M ARR in 3 months. | Chaz Englander, Founder of ModelML · PMF Show Feb 12, 2026 · 2 mentions

He wrote the book on Account Based Marketing. Here are his GTM secrets for enterprise. | Bassem H... · PMF Show Feb 10, 2026 · 2 mentions

It took him 4 years to launch—then he hit $1M ARR in 30 days. | Siqi Chen, Founder of Runway · PMF Show Jan 5, 2026 · 7 mentions

Solo Episode: B2B SaaS is dead. Here's what the best AI founders are doing instead. · PMF Show Dec 29, 2025 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 5:31 Pablo Srugo So, okay, right now you're probably using Excel or word or these kind of horizontal tools. 3 times in the scene

He spent 5 months working with customers before building—then grew to $10s of millions ARR. | Avi... · PMF Show Sep 22, 2025 · 8 mentions

  • ▶ 6:33 Aviv Leibovici He draws out an Excel out of his drawer and says, this Excel is my tracking of what's going on here, and this thing takes unbelievable effort to create, and I will tell you that it's far from accurate, and this is how I run this job. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 15:58 Aviv Leibovici So very early on, this was about, in essence, that Excel that that first guy showed us from his desk.
  • ▶ 16:53 Pablo Srugo Or like, how come these people are using Excel versus some other project management software? 3 times in the scene
  • ▶ 43:18 Aviv Leibovici Because this person, Amir, who's our VP of industry transformation now just built this from our data, this same sort of insights in Excel and gave it to them and saw that it works.
  • ▶ 47:33 Aviv Leibovici Hack it in Excel and Power BI.

He Bootstrapped to $55M in Revenue—without ever having to hit 100% YoY growth. | Stéphan Donzé, F... · PMF Show Aug 28, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 11:20 Stéphan Donzé It's just cheaper virtual servers, and Microsoft was saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't worry, you can keep our Cook and Excel, you know, and nothing will change.

He Bootstrapped Wrike to $10M ARR—then exited for $2.2B. | Andrew Filev, Founder of Wrike & Zencoder · PMF Show Aug 25, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 45:41 Andrew Filev We're just now compacting it in, in two years where again, first there was desktop Excel and then there was Google Sheets, right?

How he grew to $100M ARR—then exited for $460M. | Zuben Matthews, Founder of Brigit · PMF Show Jul 14, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 9:26 Zuben Matthews But the learnings that I had, whether it was being a financial analyst and an investment bank, again, understanding Excel, even learning how to build, uh, spreadsheets or presentations, but most importantly, as I got more senior and got to…

He went 7 years with no revenue— then grew to $100M ARR. | Rob Woollen, Co-Founder of Sigma · PMF Show Jun 30, 2025 · 9 mentions

  • ▶ 14:47 Rob Woollen And for those people, the only real choice was you would look at one of these tools and you press download to Excel. 3 times in the scene
  • ▶ 22:48 Rob Woollen They just want them to download to Excel and essentially get out of there.
  • ▶ 40:14 Pablo Srugo Where does that idea come from to use like an Excel, like spreadsheet, like UI? 3 times in the scene
  • ▶ 49:31 Pablo Srugo So you would play in an Excel like thing, but then have to go somewhere else to see the visualization versus like an Excel with your charts right there as you kind of edit it. 2 times in the scene

How his $2B startup grew to $10M+ ARR with zero marketing. | Avery Pennarun, Founder of Tailscale · PMF Show Jun 9, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 7:18 Avery Pennarun So it's, if you, if you can think of it sort of like Excel, except that instead of just building sheets, you like put together tables, and then you could put together little forms that are like drag and drop that like let people edit the…

He launched a “side-project”— now it’s used by 10% of all restaurants. | Jordan Boesch, Founder o... · PMF Show Apr 28, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 3:24 Jordan Boesch That was the first version, which is basically allowing folks to all log in with the same email and password and then download the Excel spreadsheet that my dad would upload through the app that I had built initially.
  • ▶ 16:31 Jordan Boesch There's still, it's still, like, 60% of people come up from paper and excel, still.

He invested in 684 AI startups—& realized that quitters always win. | Jack Kuveke, Founder turned... · PMF Show Apr 1, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 33:18 Jack Kuveke So I would say like, you know, rather than, you know, getting, you know, uh, OpenAI to answer a question for a client, you know, say you ask OpenAI, like, hey, how do I, you know, do a, you know, a table system in Excel?

He got rejected by 40 VCs & had 6 months of runway—2 years later, he raised $100M from a16z. | Ed... · PMF Show Mar 17, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 4:48 Edo Liberty She said, sure, you know, our kids go to school, they have clothes, we have, we have a car, just promise me we will be able to keep paying the mortgage, and so we took out the Excel spreadsheet, we looked at it, it's like, yep,

Post-YC, he split with his co-founder—then grew profitably to $2M ARR with just 5 people. | Jon Y... · PMF Show Mar 13, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 7:43 Jon Yoo You know, what invented banking was like in some regards at the higher stage, just when you're, when you're an Excel monkey, right?

Amplitude is now a $1.5B public company. Here's how they beat competitors with a 10x cheaper prod... · PMF Show Feb 20, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 15:39 Jeff Wang Uh, you know, you got a database of like a hundred people and it's like, well, your analytics can be literate and you could use Excel and you're fine. 2 times in the scene

He raised $1.5M, hit $400K ARR in 9 months— but had to Exit Early. Here’s the top 3 lessons he le... · PMF Show Nov 14, 2024 · 1 mention

They hit $100M ARR—in a "crowded market". Here's how they got to $1M ARR in just 18 months. | Don... · PMF Show Sep 3, 2024 · 16 mentions

  • ▶ 3:37 Don Mal All of the vendors were replacing Microsoft Excel as the tool that most companies use for budgeting and planning. 5 times in the scene
  • ▶ 4:18 Pablo Srugo But like this idea of like replacing Excel for anything around finance just sounds insane. 6 times in the scene
  • ▶ 7:30 Don Mal If they could have a solution that leveraged Microsoft Excel as the grid technology within an application framework, which is what Vena was and is, um, then the market would want that.
  • ▶ 11:06 Don Mal Market looked like we were essentially replacing Excel on its own.
  • ▶ 14:41 Pablo Srugo And by the way, we didn't talk about this, we kind of just took it for granted, but like what goes into budgeting and planning, and especially back then in 20, 1120, 12, like, you know, people were using Excel, that was status quo.
  • ▶ 25:49 Pablo Srugo And by the way, what was like the, the biggest ROI that you sold on, especially in the early days when you were just getting people to move off of Excel or to like enhance Excel? 2 times in the scene

He raised $275M in the last 3 years. His 'boring' B2B startup is now a $1B unicorn. | Andrew Butt... · PMF Show Apr 1, 2024 · 2 mentions

How to Validate an Idea | Eran Henig, Founder of Thriver · PMF Show Mar 8, 2024 · 1 mention

How to Bootstrap from 0 to Millions in Revenue w/ Ilya (CEO & Founder, Vanhack) · PMF Show Mar 8, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 22:29 unnamed speaker We also used to send out, uh, Excel files where we have like, um, skills of people like here's engineer.

Rodolphe Barrere, Founder of PotLoc | How to Find Product Market Fit · PMF Show Jul 31, 2023 · 1 mention

Nabeil Alazzam, Founder of Forma.ai | How the First Enterprise Sale Leads to Product Market Fit · PMF Show Jul 17, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 27:53 Nabeil Alazzam So you have this algorithm that you load in, but instead of doing it in Excel for every customer one off, we basically have this like unified data model and then we run these algorithms on all, like any, anytime there's a, you know,…

Mike Katchen, Co-Founder of Wealthsimple | How to Come up with an Idea that Gets Product Market Fit · PMF Show Apr 17, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 5:04 Mike Katchen I built a simple spreadsheet in Excel that tried to show these friends basically how to build a portfolio, how to choose a set of ETFs or stocks to build your portfolio with, how to rebalance it, how to optimize it for taxes.

Hongwei Liu, Founder of MappedIn | How to Find Product Market Fit · PMF Show Feb 1, 2023 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 14:26 Hongwei Liu It was faster to just go in and type your own words than, you know, imagine, imagine you didn't have Microsoft Word or word processing or Excel, and the only way you could change the spreadsheet that you're using is to call somebody over…
  • ▶ 20:32 Hongwei Liu Once it was investing in tools and realizing that it's about having self-service, like self-serve tools for like my mom who can use Excel, but we'll never figure out AutoCAD.
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