Aswath Damodaran

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The spreadsheet that changed my mind was not mine.

It was a model someone had built overnight — a full discounted cash flow valuation of a mid-cap SaaS company, generated through a conversation with Claude. Revenue projections, margin assumptions, discount rates, terminal value. Formatted cleanly. Internally consistent. The kind of work that used to take an analyst two weeks and a finance degree.

I looked at it and felt the vertigo. Not because the model was wrong. Because it was right enough. Right enough to pass a first review. Right enough to inform a decision. Right enough to make you wonder what, exactly, a junior analyst is for.

Then I caught myself. Because the model was also empty. It had numbers. It had structure. It did not have a