The Day I Stopped Trusting Spreadsheets

I stopped trusting spreadsheets in 2006.

We were building My Yoga Online. Bootstrapped and barely making rent. I thought hiring a consultant would help us figure out the path forward.

He built me this beautiful model. It showed exactly when we would hit profitability, which features to build first, and how to allocate our limited resources. It looked so professional and data-driven. I felt like we finally had a plan.

It was also completely wrong.

Not because the math was bad. The math was fine. But the assumptions underneath it were all off. He assumed people would behave rationally. He assumed the market would stay stable. He assumed our biggest competitor wouldn't suddenly pivot their entire strategy.

None of that happened.

The model said to build one specific feature first. My gut was screaming at me to focus on content instead. But I had this nice spreadsheet now, so I ignored my gut and followed the model.

We wasted six months building the wrong thing.

That is when I learned something I wish I had understood earlier. Data tells you where you have been. Instinct tells you where to go.

I see founders doing this same thing now, especially with AI. They are modeling everything, testing every variable, and optimizing every metric. They have dashboards for their dashboards.

But they are completely paralyzed.

Because depending on how you look at the data, it says three different things. And none of them feel quite right.

Here is what I have noticed. You already know what you need to do. You just don't trust it because there is no spreadsheet backing it up.

That is the whole problem.