Financial Modeling

Financial modeling is the practice of building spreadsheet forecasts and valuations of a company. The saved tweets filed here treat it as a useful but limited tool, and most of them are warnings about over-trusting the model.

What the references say

• Process over projections. Jai Malik argues that building a bottoms-up model at the seed stage is underrated, not for the final projections, which “don’t really matter,” but because the process shows how hard a product’s Unit Economics are.
• Models can be steered. Jason Lemkin warns that a model’s inputs are often manipulated by a smart ex-banker, consultant or analyst to produce a desired outcome.
• Valuation is more art than science. An explainer thread on what a company is worth opens with that claim and argues that no single bulletproof number exists.
• Know when a DCF is useless. Brian Feroldi lists nine stocks (Amazon, Netflix, Shopify, Tesla and others) that a Discounted Cash Flow model would have told an investor to avoid, and concludes that DCFs are useful only when you know when.
• Complexity and false precision. A quote attributed to Benoit Mandelbrot says that most financial models “say little with much” and are seldom discarded when they lose money.
• The story comes first. Buyback Capital says there is no formula: modelling can become too attached to its assumptions, and the best investors begin and end with the story that explains the numbers.
• Learning resources. One tweet lists a reading and course stack for valuation and modelling, including the work of Aswath Damodaran.
• Prompt-driven analysis. BuccoCapital Bloke shares a deep-research prompt that produces an investment memo with a Buy / Hold / Sell call, a business-quality scorecard and hardcoded investment hurdles.

Where this appears

Saved tweets

• Building a Financial Model at… (tweet)
• “I’ve Seen This So Many… (tweet)
• A Discounted Cash Flow Model… (tweet)
• Most Financial Models Say Little… (tweet)
• I Get Quite a Few… (tweet)
• How to Determine What a… (tweet)
• Valuation by McKinsey Investment Banking… (tweet)
• Here is V2 of my… (tweet)
• If You’re Into Financial Models… (tweet) — Oct 2026: a PE associate’s account of an intern building a three-statement model with Claude, and the reply “pivot to ontologies.”