Profile / Tech's Spreadsheet Whisperer
Evan
Armstrong
He turned unit economics into prose people actually enjoy - then bet his future on a one-person publication.
// Net income, suddenly a page-turner.
He turned unit economics into prose people actually enjoy - then bet his future on a one-person publication.
In April 2026, Evan Armstrong tweeted that starting a company while parenting a newborn "feels a little insane." He did it anyway. He had just quit a comfortable, salaried writing job at Every - the kind of perch most writers spend a decade chasing - to build a solo publication called The Leverage entirely from scratch.
For four years he was the lead voice of Napkin Math, the column where revenue, COGS, and net income stopped being eye-glazing balance-sheet vocabulary and became something close to entertainment. He explained how the machine of modern technology actually makes money, who holds the power inside it, and why it matters to the people building the next thing. He published almost half a million words doing it. Then he walked.
The Leverage is the swing. Free weekly summaries up top, paywalled deep dives underneath, all of it pointed at the same audience he has always written for: founders, operators, and the investors writing the checks. The pitch is unfashionably high-minded - that "the most transformative era in human history deserves analysis that's rigorous, actionable, and beautiful." Coming from most people that would read as a slogan. Coming from a man who scaled software companies past $10M in revenue before he ever filed a piece, it reads as a spec sheet.
"I view my job as delivering a top 1% product of the market - otherwise, what is the point of doing this at all?" - Evan Armstrong
Before any of this, Evan did math and PowerPoint. That was the whole resume - venture capital, business operations, strategy work, including stretches at Substack and the retail-tech startup Stockwell. He had never been paid a cent to write. By his own telling, he wasn't even trying to be a writer.
The accident that changed it was an essay about the design ethics of dating apps. It went semi-viral among his friends on Facebook, which was just enough oxygen to keep him going. He wrote another, then another, and the pile of essays quietly became a newsletter on Substack. The readership grew. Then came the signal no growth chart can fake: people tracked down his Venmo account and started paying him, unprompted, for words he was giving away for free.
That is the kind of product-market fit you cannot manufacture. He wrote a freelance piece about revenue for Napkin Math, and when the column's previous author moved on, Every handed him the keys. The guy who showed up with spreadsheets had talked his way into one of tech's most respected writing jobs.
"Big personal news: I walked away from my cushy writing job at Every to launch my own startup today. The Leverage is my big swing." - Evan Armstrong, announcing The Leverage
The Napkin Math trick was deceptively hard. Most finance writing chooses a side: either rigorous and dull, or fun and wrong. Evan refused the trade. He rebuilt the column around deep, deeply funny explainers of the words investors throw around - revenue, COGS, net income, gross margin - and treated them as if the reader were both smart and busy. No condescension, no filler, just the mechanism of how money moves through a company, rendered legible.
Across the run he ranged well past accounting. He wrote a case against Sam Altman, mapped the dream of the one-person billion-dollar company, made a defense of "the unoptimized life," and filed dispatches from new fatherhood under the title "Dad Mode." The throughline was profit and power: who has it, how they got it, and what the spreadsheet reveals that the press release hides.
He scaled real companies and sourced real deals. The analysis carries operator scar tissue, not just commentary.
The point is never to sound smart. It is to tell founders and investors what to do with the information.
He is finishing a Master's in Non-fiction Writing at Johns Hopkins. The prose is the product, not the packaging.
Every was working. The audience was there, the paycheck was steady, the brand was respected. Leaving it to start a company - with a newborn at home - is not the obvious move. It is the kind of decision that only makes sense if you believe the idea has to exist whether or not it is convenient.
The Leverage is built on a simple wager: that tech markets are shifting faster than most people's mental models can track, and that there is real demand for analysis that is clear-eyed instead of hyped. It covers LLMs and frontier technology - quantum, biotech, VR and AR - alongside geopolitical shifts and the slow disruption of venture capital itself. Two formats, one promise: explain not just what matters, but why it matters and how to act on it.
He is doing it the way he writes - by treating the reader as an intelligent adult and refusing to ship anything that is not, in his words, a top-1% product. The audience of founders, investors, and senior operators has followed. The bet is live.