I [heart] Pivot Tables

Hi everyone, two weeks of TEC under my belt and lots to talk about. I’ll jump right in with an update about work at B-Stock Solutions and the nerdy moment I had in the title of this post.

I’m definitely settling into life at the B-Stock offices. For one, I’m actually not the new guy anymore! This past week, we added two additional employees, so I’m no longer the sole target of hazing in the office (just kidding)! The main project I’ve been working on this past week is attempting to figure out the lifetime value of a B-Stock buyer. This meant sorting through thousands of lines of user data and whipping out all sorts of stats knowledge that I semi-remember. My really nerdy moment came when I was using a pivot table in Excel to sort the data by various categories and dimensions to help me with my calculations. Midway through rearranging my tables, I suddenly began to appreciate how useful Excel and pivot tables actually were. It would have taken hours to scroll through thousands of data points to find the right ones, but thanks to Excel, the right ones would pop up with just a few clicks of the mouse. It reminded me of one of the speakers at Structure last week who said that Microsoft Excel was one of the most undervalued pieces of software out there. At the time, I thought he was crazy because Excel is anything but cheap. However once you think about the productivity boost the program provides, I couldn’t agree with him more. In my excitement, I tweeted “I ♥ pivot tables #excel”

TEC this week focused on term sheets. As a finance major, I was pretty excited about this because it was closely related to what I am studying. However, I quickly learned two things. First of all, term sheets are more of a legal document than a financial document. Even though I understood some of the vocabulary and concepts, there was a lot more that I didn’t understand and the wording of some of the sections were just very strange. Second, there’s a huge difference between school and the real world. In school, you do homework problems with nice textbook numbers that fit together nicely, but it’s much less straightforward in the real world. Of course, most finance classes brush over venture capital and it’s very different animal, but it still made me realize that there are a lot of things I will only be able to learn in the real world. It was great to listen to Phil Black share his encyclopedic and explain the tricks of the trade. It definitely made me realize that not all term sheets are created equal.

Outside of work, it’s been a pretty fun week too. Monday, True took us to the Giants-Dodgers game. Although I’m a sports fan, I never really got into baseball, so this was my first Major League Baseball game. I had a great time chatting, enjoying the greasy ballpark food, and following the game. It would’ve been nice to see the Giants win, but it was still a good time (I followed my rule which is to root for the home team when no other interests are at stake). Aside from that, I got to visit the new Taskrabbit office in San Francisco. Last summer, I interned with them when they were RUNmyERRAND in Boston. I can’t believe it’s a full year already. Lastly, I had a great 4th of July with some fellow TECers.

PS- One of the perks of TEC is we get to try out new stuff before the general public. Check out my about.me profile at about.me/steven (Yes take that all you other Stevens out there!)