#22 — 24th February: The IT Crowd

@Conference Call

3 min readSep 7, 2022

Prior to our call with his IT folks, I had taken Mr. Independent through our financials. He was tough on our numbers; which was great because the man is a financial wizard.

He challenged me on almost every line of my spreadsheet and wanted to know how and why I arrived at every number; from employee benefits to the rent and office supplies. We went through the thinking, real-world research and assumptions behind every line item.

It was a valuable lesson, and I was glad I had spent so much time doing my homework. In the end he did not ask me to change anything.

This was the first time on this journey that I patted myself on the back, because numbers have never been my strong suit. So, I had to work ten times harder to understand the basics of how to put operating expenses together.

Now, it was time to take Roy and Maurice (names of the lead characters from the IT Crowd) through the presentation and they too seemed impressed with the idea but peppered us with a number of technical questions which Dave took on with adeptness and confidence.

They seemed most concerned about the fact that there was no secret sauce that we could make proprietary or that was patentable. Dave explained that everything we were using to build our product was prior art; however, the manner in which we were putting it all together was pretty unique and not easy to replicate.

I added that our vision and how well we executed the idea would help us differentiate it and keep us ahead of the competition, even if someone did replicate the basic technical sauce. Not sure they seemed convinced, or maybe they were just looking for something proprietary.

Either way it was another real world rehearsal and an opportunity for Dave to flex his technical muscles for the first time.

We ended the call with Mr. Independent saying that if Roy and Maurice had any additional thoughts or question, he would let us know.

P.S. Here’s an index of all the articles in this series:

#22 — 24th February: The IT Crowd

@Conference Call

Written by Nikhil Vaish