Most founders build financial models for someone else.

An investor asks for projections. A lender wants numbers. The board needs a forecast. The spreadsheet gets built, the assumptions get polished, and once the meeting is over, the model quietly disappears.

Sameer Jagetia thinks that gets financial modeling backwards.

After starting his career analyzing companies in investment banking and hedge funds, Sameer moved to the other side of the table, founding Redbooks and Robuzz and advising early-stage companies. That experience changed how he thinks about what the numbers are actually for.

A financial model shouldn't just explain your business to investors. It should help you run it.

In this episode of Margin for Error, Sameer and I unpack what he looks for first when reviewing a startup's numbers, the assumptions founders routinely overlook, and why financial discipline becomes more important, not less, as a company grows.

We also get into a surprisingly common go-to-market mistake: selling by demo. Sameer explains why showing everything your product can do isn't the same as giving a customer a reason to buy, and what founders should focus on instead.

And we talk about AI. As building models, analyzing data, and generating forecasts become dramatically easier, the scarce skill shifts from producing the analysis to knowing what questions to ask, what assumptions to challenge, and what decisions to make.

If your financial model only comes out when an investor asks for it, this conversation may change what you think the model is actually for.

📖 Get The Last Mile of Trust, Ed Lee's bestselling guide to building pricing systems that turn value into sustainable growth: https://geni.us/TheLastMileofTrust