I'm Taylor Davidson. I help entrepreneurs and investors build rock-solid financial models.
In 2024 I wrote a bit about what I enjoy about using AI tools to build things : What I enjoy most about using AI tools like ChatGPT is that they expand the range of what I want to figure out. The simple viewpoint to AI tools is that they automate things that existing technology and people do, and thus replaces the things that exist today. I prefer to operate with a viewpoint towards expanding…
Last year in my first annual reporting cycle as CFO , I encountered a small challenge in distributing Schedule K1s to limited partners (LPs) in a few investment special purpose vechicles (SPVs) . We were not using a platform to manage the SPVs, so I was just working with an Excel detailing the LP names and email addresses. Provided a set of PDFs from our tax preparer, how should I distribute them…
Year 20 seems like a time to celebrate. Below are my cities in 2025 ( here’s 2024 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2025 Pittsburgh, PA Breckenridge, CO Cleveland, OH (2) Champion, PA West Bay, Roatan, Honduras Miami, FL Boardman, OH (2) Orlando, FL Walt Disney Cruise (Cozumel, Castaway Cay) St…
When my family travels, we focus on cultural explorations more than historical landmarks. We seek out libraries, sports, music, parks, the things that make up daily life in the places we visit. We want to understand how people live, not just what they’ve built, picking up ideas to add to our daily lives. The sauna became the highlight of our time in Finland. Personally, I’ve always loved saunas…
I never figured myself as a ski bum. I grew up on the water, used to warm weather, being wet, sandy, sunburned, tasting salty water, in and out of lakes and oceans. I was comfortable boogie boarding and body surfing, floating over rollers and ducking under waves, but I never really learned to surf. So I didn’t have a great relationship with snow or a comfort with speed until I learned to ski. * *…
Year 19! Below are my cities in 2024 ( here’s 2023 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2024 Fajardo, Puerto Rico San Juan, Puerto Rico Louisville, KY Seven Springs, PA Champion, PA West Palm Beach, FL Walt Disney Cruise, Carribean Washington, DC Las Vegas, NV Venice, CA (3) Pittsburgh, PA…
Seventeen years ago I wrote a post called Everyone is a Photographer , responding to the seeming ubiquity of people taking and sharing photos using digital cameras and photo sharing sites and the impact it would have on the photography industry. Written just a couple months after the release of the first iPhone, the trends accelerated in the decades afterward, with visual images becoming a…
My son asked me “what does it take to make something great?” the other day while we were playing Uno. Kind of an out of the blue question while he was debating what card to play. I love questions like this because it’s a chance to be a Dad. He’s thinking about something, he’s listening, engaged, and trying to figure something out, and here I am, ready to find a way to impart years of wisdom in a…
Many of the financial modeling products on Foresight are priced at fixed prices ranging from $74 to over $400 USD, but most of the products are free with the option for people to donate what they want (also called "pay-what-you-want" products ). My goal in starting Foresight was to make it easier and cheaper for people to build better financial models to help them make better business decisions.…
Every month or so I get an email asking about what ecommerce platform or template I used for Foresight , and I think most people are surpised that the design is completely custom . I’ve built my own websites since 1998, but don’t consider myself a web developer, just a person who is good at using educational resoures to figure things out. What I enjoy most about using AI tools like ChatGPT is that…
Year 18! Below are my cities in 2023 ( here’s 2022 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2023 Pittsburgh, PA Somerset, PA St. Augustine, FL (2) Indianapolis, IN Iowa City, IA Cheyenne, WY Park City, UT Flagstaff, AZ Sedona, AZ Scottsdale, AZ Santa Rosa, NM Conway, AR Cookeville, TN Davis, WV…
Fourteen years ago I wrote about how I grew up with baseball stats , and perhaps the biggest change in the game since then has been an explosion in the amount of data available and used in the game. Statcast is the big change. Introduced in 2015, Statcast uses radar and camera systems to measure various facets of the game, from pitch velocity and spin rate to batted ball speed and defensive…
Year 17! Below are my cities in 2022 ( here’s 2021 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2022 Pittsburgh, PA Snowshoe Mountain, WV Davis, WV (3) Phoenix, AZ South Lake Tahoe, CA Anaheim, CA Rancho Las Verdes, CA Dolly Sods Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, WV Sandusky, OH Richmond, VA…
My sons love to color, but oddly (not surprisingly?) they don’t love coloring books. Instead of settling for whatever is in a book, they want to color what they want to color. At some point when my oldest was a couple years old, we discovered that a websearch for “something he wants to color” coloring page would turn up tons of pages just ready to print out and color. And ever since then, it’s a…
Year 16! Below are my cities in 2021 ( here’s 2020 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2021 Pittsburgh, PA Somerset, PA Eagles Mere, PA Erie, PA Marlinton, WV Slanesville, WV Luray, VA Cleveland, OH Columbus, OH Corolla, NC Stockbridge, MA Great Barrington, MA Davis, WV Seneca Rocks and Spruce…
I recently had to analyze whether I should refinance our mortgage, and did the same thing that most of use would do: start searching for articles about what to consider, how to calculate it, and started testing the various online calculators to help understand the math behind the decision. Each calculator has the same inputs, the same analysis, the same links to lenders. But something felt off,…
Now in year 15, below are my cities in 2020 ( here’s 2019 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2020 Manchester Center, VT Pittsburgh, PA Somerset, PA Wittman, MD Indian Lake, PA Marlinton, WV (Cranberry Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest) Middleburg, VA For obvious reasons, 2020 was a…
Now in year 14, below are my cities in 2019 ( here’s 2018 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2019 Pittsburgh, PA Alexandria, VA Tulum, Mexico Sugar Grove, VA Mouth of Wilson, VA Erie, PA Brooklyn, NY (2) Poconos, PA Hamptons, NY Toronto, ON, Canada Washington, DC Austin, TX Luray, VA George…
If you’ve ever built a financial model, you’ve likely encountered the joy of digging through emails and lists of files with similar-sounding file names, trying to figure out which file is the most recent version; or integrating comments and edits from multiple people and their specific versions into one “master” model. The longer the file name, the higher the version names, the more one questions…
It is with deep sadness and complete heartbreak that we share our beloved Piper passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. A few years ago, she was sick for one day - the only sign of weakness she ever showed in her life. We’d like to thank the Golden Bone, Point Breeze Vet and my sister Tori for all they did to try to save her. It was instant and there was nothing anyone could do, but everyone gave…
Now in year 13, below are my cities in 2018 ( here’s 2017 ). As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2018 Pittsburgh, PA Toronto, ON St. Augustine, FL Chalk Hill, PA Scottsdale, AZ Milford, CT Chambersburg, PA Nosara, Costa Rica Dolly Sods, WV 2018 was a year spent primarily at home - zero conferences,…
2018 was a year of continued personal and professional changes and growth. It was a year spent largely at home - zero conferences, one business trip, a couple vacations, with 93% of my nights spent at home , as we invested our time into our companies, community, and family. The vast majority of my creative and intellectual energy in the year went towards building Foresight , building new and…
Continuing a meme , below are my cities in 2017. As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2017 Pittsburgh, PA Deep Creek, MD (2) London, England Calcot, England Bedford, PA Deep Creek, MD Milford, CT Erie, PA Jersey City, NJ (2) San Francisco, CA Los Angeles, CA Ojai, CA Allegheny National Forest, PA…
My interest in the imaging industry stemmed from my love for photography. I rolled, shot, processed and printed black and white film in high school, I played around in darkrooms, I carried a camera and took pictures of people and places to share moments about me and what I saw. As I got older, I continued to carry a camera, often walking around with a point and shoot (first film, then digital) in…
Last year, on all of the episodes of our podcast , my wife and I made sure to ask all of our guests a simple question: “What’s your favorite number?” On one of the episodes I gave my own answer to that question ( at the 41 minute mark ), and explained how my favorite “number” are the years on object labels at art museums. Object labels describe the piece they are next to and provide a description…
A year ago I reorganized my app layout on my phone’s homescreen and did something that might seem a bit drastic. I put almost every app into a single folder, and deposited that folder in the bottom drawer. And except for the first couple screens in the folder, the apps are organized essentially by the dominant color of their app logo, not by what they do. [1] I left a couple apps on the homescreen…
A couple years ago I took a walkabout around the US, Eastern Europe and Japan. Parts of it were amazing, immersive experiences that I couldn’t have planned, some were hard, depressing days alone in places that weren’t what I has anticipated, many were the same normal days that escape from us no matter where we are. That’s the reality of a long, solo trip. But throughout my trip, I always went out…
For years, I’ve wanted to relax in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, drop my body into the warm, blue, mineral-rich waters and gaze into the mist coming off the warm water into the cold air. I imagined that I’d feel the difference between water and sky by bobbing my head between the two, crossing the unseen horizon languidly throughout the day. A castle in the sky, surely. But it’s something I’ve always…
Last year I shot a series called Observing , images of people experiencing art, from museums that we visited around the world that year. Why? Because I’m fascinated by how people observe their worlds, and museums is one example where we’re all seeing the same things, yet we’re often seeing it differently. People’s bodies and actions provide a signal of what’s going through their minds. The…
On a break from lectures at The Do Lectures, we rode from the farm to the edge of the Welsh coast to find a wild swimming hole. We walked along the cliffs of the coast, and soon found the walk. The cold, the lack of swimming trunks, the fact that none of us knew each other: all of those fears disappeared, and in we went. (Chris explains the adventure beautifully, elegantly, at Wild swim at the…
London has always been a second home for me, a place and a culture that influenced me at an impressionable age, and I’ve always felt oddly at home there. And so I walked out of the train station, fresh off the plane from Iceland and just landing in central London, ready to collapse and rest, but also eager to explore. I walked down to the tube, but as I about to purchase a ticket to wisk me away…
I had a feeling when I got in. The fact that he almost backed up over the bellhop was an auspicious sign, or that he brusquely asked me to put my bags on the floor instead of the seat, but I pushed the doubt aside as told him where I was going, committing to him taking me to the airport. But my gut was right. Driving far too fast, talking on the phone, swerving dangerously, passing cars, gunning…
Seven AM is about when they open the gates. By “they,” I’m referring to the NYC Parks Department and the staff that open and close the gates to over 1,700 municipal parks in the five boroughs of NYC. Every morning when I take our dog for a walk, I’m cognizant of the opening times of the two parks we frequent, and often see the staff unlocking the padlocks to the gates. Except this morning she…
“Fill out these forms after the meeting to give feedback.” “What are these forms going to be used for?” “You know, I don’t know.” Um, ok. I’ve learned a lot about meetings over the years. It’s come through experience. I’ve been in a lot of meetings. And right now, my job revolves around meeting people face-to-face, one-on-one, small groups, in engaged conversations and passive presentations. And…
Continuing a meme , below are my cities in 2016. As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2016 Pittsburgh, PA Seattle, WA (3) Bainbridge Island, WA Chambersburg, PA Palm Springs, CA Los Angeles, CA (2) Baltimore, MD Bedford Springs, PA Lost City, WV Ashford, WA New York, NY (2) Girdletree, MD Lewes, DE…
A few years I wrote a post called How to Pack for a Nomadic Life (and the 79 things I packed) while I was traveling around the world and living a nomadic lifestyle . Traveling light was important to me - and looking at it now, I think I still had far too much with me - because it gave me the flexibility to pursue what I wanted, change my direction, try something new, focusing on my experiences in…
My wife and I have long thought about creating a podcast. We’ve drafted show topics and outlines, listed potential titles, thought about guests, laid plans. This week, our planning came to life with the debut of And And, a podcast about balancing career and life : Balancing personal and professional goals between a couple is an age‐old question, but the questions and answers change constantly. The…
Bots are front and center of the web’s attention these days. Bot platforms , bot summer camps , Slack bots , and now, Facebook bots . Why do we care about bots? Because bots, as a conversational interface, is a way to provide services and information over messaging interfaces, something billions of people use multiple times a day. Because messaging could anchor a post-app Internet . Because text,…
Have you heard Instagram is changing their feed? It must be a big deal for the NY Times to write multiple articles about the upcoming-but-still-in-testing-calm-down shift to an algorithmically determined feed, including explaining the brief, “seems like a good idea” sign up for notifications spree . That the shift is happening should not be a surprise. Our views to the web are parsed by the…
Fun fact: I’ve kept a spreadsheet of (nearly) every dollar I’ve spent since 1998. Extreme? Perhaps. I recently listened to an Planet Money podcast called DIY Finance , about all the ways that people manage their personal finances, and it reminded me that I’m probably not normal in how I track my expenses. When I was in college, I started using Excel to track the money I spent by recording each…
As part of EyeEm’s 5 Predictions for the Future of Photography , next to predictions from executives from The Tim Hetherington Trust, Google, EyeEm, and Kaptur, I contributed a thought about something I think we’ll see in social and stock imagery: Awash in images of our daily lives, we’re acutely aware of images as tools for communication, and we’re heavily attuned to the messages behind the…
(Originally posted to Teachable ) I hadn’t seriously considered creating a course until I sat down and sketched out what the course could be and what it would take to do it right. I’ve taught entrepreneurs how to build financial models for nearly a decade, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I seriously considered creating an online video course called Learn Financial Modeling for Startups.…
Continuing a meme , below are my cities in 2015. As always, only cities where I spent a night count, and the # in parentheses are the number of visits on non-consecutive night visits. 2015 Chamberburg, PA (3) New York, NY (3) Arlington, VT (5) Toronto, Canada Philadelphia, PA (4) Mitta, Victoria, Australia Payne’s Hut, Victoria, Australia Melbourne, Australia Sydney, Australia New Orleans, LA (2)…
Gift guides are very popular, and for good reason. But I want to approach the gift guide a bit differently, focusing on the gifts an entrepreneur can give themselves to prepare for 2016. Here’s how you can get ready for the great year ahead. Business Planning How much time do you spend thinking fundamentally about your business? If you’re like most of us, you’re trying to balance your time, money,…
I recently created a video course to teach people how to create financial models , and wrote about how I approached forecasting whether it was worth my time and effort to build it ( guest post on Teachable ). What I didn’t talk about is how I teach financial modeling, and why I’ve struggled to find the right way to teach financial modeling for a number of years. I learned how to build financial…
On October 26 I participated in a fireside chat about “Real Photography” at the DMLA’s annual conference . [1] Ostensibly about “what new technologies are doing for photography”, it became a place and a time for everyone - not just the panelists, but the entire room - to talk about anything happening at the intersection of photography and technology. [2] One lesson: any conversation today that…
The new iPhones came out a couple weeks ago, and what interested me the most, more than any of the new product features, are the new financing options now offered by the US carriers and Apple. US carriers are moving people away from one- and two-year contract structures toward installment or leasing plans that typically offer shorter timeframes for people to upgrade their phones. And so, for many…
“Minimalism”, like “youth” , is a mode, an attitude, and it isn’t defined by a number. Minimalism applies to our mental space as much as the physical. “Minimalism isn’t traveling the world with nothing” ; it’s about being mindful and conscious about what we use, what we do, how we spend our time, who we spend our time with, and what we focus on. There was a time when tracking the number of things…
I think it was 2011, or right around when Warby Parker raised their Series A , when technology startups woke up to the concept that building a brand could be a core competency. [1] Warby’s sense of branding, and how the experience of buying stylish, inexpensive, meaningful eyeglasses through the innovative home try-on process, opened eyes and spawned a range of articles and opinions about how…
I recently did a guest appearance on a podcast talking a bit about me - financial models, Foresight and fundraising - and a lot more about big data and privacy, how apps and operating systems are changing, and machine learning and artificial intelligence. [1] One of the biggest topics we talked about, starting at 13:51 , was about data and how product creators and marketers use data: We’ve been…