Lessons
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Why AI Can’t Replace Experts (Yet): Word vs. World Models
I keep seeing the headlines. You have probably seen them too. They claim accountants, lawyers, and coders will be obsolete in a year. If you ask a startup founder, they look at an AI-generated legal memo and say, “This is perfect. Lawyers are done.” If you ask a lawyer, they look at the same memo…
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Accrual’s $75M Bet: Can AI Finally Fix Accounting Workflows?
My mom worked in accounting back when ledgers were actual paper books. She likes to remind me how manual everything was. We moved to spreadsheets and then to cloud software, but let’s be honest: I still spend a massive amount of my day moving data from Point A to Point B. We talk about automation…
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AI Is Your New Study Buddy: Testing ChatGPT, Gemini, and NotebookLM
I was reading a New York Times article recently where they asked eight different AI experts—scientists and researchers—where they thought the technology would be in five years. They disagreed on a lot, but they all agreed on one specific area that is about to get disrupted: Education. We usually think about this in terms of high schoolers…
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Stop The Spreadsheet Dump: Mastering the 60-Second CFO Brief
I remember early in my career spending days building the “perfect” financial model. It had tabs upon tabs of data, intricate formulas, and perfect formatting. I sent it up the chain, expecting applause. Instead? I got a confused email asking, “What am I looking at?” I realized then that data without a narrative isn’t an…
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AI-Driven Fraud: The New Reality for Accountants (and How to Stop It)
I used to treat phishing emails as a bit of a joke. You know the ones—poorly spelled subject lines, desperate pleas from a “Prince” in a foreign country, or logos that looked like they were pasted in MS Paint. They were annoying, but they were easy to spot. That era is over. Yesterday, I received…
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Amazon’s Layoffs: Why Tech Talent Was Treated Like Inventory (And The Tax Bill That Changed It)
I’ve been reading a lot of hot takes on the recent Amazon layoffs. 30,000 roles gone in a few months is massive. Most headlines scream about “AI taking jobs” or “reducing bureaucracy.” But when I dug into the numbers and the underlying accounting principles, I found a different story. It reminded me of a concept…
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The AI Revolution in Accounts Payable: Why Manual Invoicing is Dead
I was reading a thread on Reddit the other day that gave me second-hand anxiety. An accounts payable clerk described a “fat-finger” error where they accidentally added a zero to a payment. Instead of sending a vendor $10,000, they sent $100,000. Panic ensued. Jobs were lost. The money was eventually clawed back, but the damage to the…
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The $150 Billion Bet: Microsoft, Nvidia, and the AI Depreciation Trap
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately staring at the CapEx lines of big tech companies. The numbers are staggering. We are looking at hundreds of billions of dollars poured into hardware that, historically, loses its value faster than a new car driving off the lot. Everyone is talking about Nvidia’s stock price. But…
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Capital One Buys Brex: A $5 Billion Lesson in Valuation and Strategy
I remember when Brex was the default setting for Silicon Valley. If you were a funded startup in 2019, you had a Brex card in your wallet. It wasn’t a choice; it was just what you did. But recently, I’ve been watching the landscape shift. I started seeing more Ramp cards. I saw Brex pivot away from small businesses.…
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The AI Paradigm Shift: Why “Bigger” Is No Longer Better
I spent the last year thinking that if we just fed ChatGPT more data it would eventually become a genius. I assumed that scale equals intelligence. But recently I tried to use an LLM for a complex multi-step tax reconciliation. It failed. It didn’t just fail; it confidently lied about the numbers. It reminded me…