Fred Wilson from AVC blog talks about the three things that a CEO does.

• Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders
• Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company
• Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank

All other tasks should be delegated to his or her team.

While vision and recruitment for talent is an important aspect of building a company that evolves with time, the last point on having enough cash or not running out of money directly impacts the survival of the startup and hence holds precedence than the first two.

A financial model is the blueprint for a company’s survival and growth. It quantifies the very assumptions on which the startup is based on. The numbers provide objectivity & control while bringing credibility to the overall vision of the startup.

While there are a plethora of financial modelling templates available online, using them might do more harm than good. The free templates are generic, easy to break and might not capture your business model while the paid ones are built by finance professionals for the peers in their industry and organisation. And just like easter eggs, they might have hidden errors, which require thorough testing and validation.

So what should a founder do?

We have a built a tool (Samkhyameaningnumbers) that helps automatically build an editable financial model based on minimal inputs.

The financial model is also linked with three data-driven valuation approaches. This helps identify if any particular activity say an expense is either going to add on the topline or the bottom line and would have an impact on the value of the startup.The scenario analysis captures how the value can change if we change the parameters around customers, revenue, profitability and cost of capital.

This helps founders identify core assumptions around the business model and its impact on the financials of the startup. The discussions on assumptions are the right conversations to have and helps refine the strategy of the company.

Samkhya is a strategic solution which is better than existing offline alternatives and can be transformative for your startup. (We might be biased but we haven’t seen anything like it :))