in response to feedback being requested The post: It's great, adds a lot of value. The calculator: Terrible idea. Might even add negative value or be counterp

in response to feedback being requested The post: It's great, adds a lot of value. The calculator: Terrible idea. Might even add negative value or be counterproductive. The post is appreciated for multiple reasons. Insights from investors are not overflowing the Internet. It’s a relatively small group, so it’s often very helpful when someone chooses to share their thinking. It also has value because it’s not just pulling back the curtain, or sharing facts, rather, it offers critical analysis of how to approach the question. Even if some of the analysis is wrong, it’s still valuable, in that it inspires further analysis and facilitates understanding of the mechanics. However the calculator is a reductionist solution to a problem, that can be highly inconsistent from one situation to another. Paraphrasing: Please input the number of kids you have? Sounds like something a government office would come up with. How about a calculator to pick startups to fund? Well, some people do try to automate betting on companies for various needs, however they often have limited success, and it usually involves very complex modeling systems, rather than a google spreadsheet. The net of it is, using a spreadsheet might be helpful to track and manipulate data inputs, but not to generate an actionable result to drive a nuanced decision. I'm wary even of using it as a starting point, given the risk of building additional reasoning on a flawed foundation. It would be a great tool to have. The problem is there are just too many subtleties to capture (known and unknown), and even then they would apply differently across the startup world's highly variable situations and contexts. In some ways the question is typical of many other questions startups encounter: It's at least partially and possibly highly subjective, the number of potentially relevant factors makes it impractical to spend lots of time of each factor, and the available data points are imperfect and/or incomplete. As AI slowly but steadily chips away at the list of things humans can do better, questions with these attributes might be the some of the very last to fall. And when they do, it will not be office productivity software that slays them.