business-planning
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Guy Haddleton and the art of starting again
He helped build Adaytum, then returned to the same stubborn problem with Anaplan. Now Guy Haddleton is putting his experience behind a different planning challenge: what New Zealand can build for itself.
Entrepreneurs Academy and the business of getting started
A good idea still needs customers, accounts and someone willing to ask awkward questions. Ireland’s Entrepreneurs Academy teaches that less glamorous - and rather useful - part of entrepreneurship.
Eléonore Crespo Is Planning for the Plan After the Plan
The Pigment co-founder learned to read uncertainty as a physicist, an operator and an investor. Now she is trying to turn the spreadsheet - corporate life’s most stubborn compromise - into a living map of what comes next.
Pigment Turns the Annual Plan Into a Living Argument
Pigment gives serious planning teams a shared model, live scenarios, and AI agents that can do more than decorate a dashboard. The trade is equally serious: this is flexible enterprise machinery, not a Friday-afternoon spreadsheet replacement.
Causal Took the Spreadsheet Apart and Kept the Good Bits
Most finance software asks you to love the spreadsheet or leave it. Causal chose the more interesting option: keep the grid, retire the cell-address archaeology, and let the whole company touch the forecast without breaking it.
Drivetrain
Drivetrain is an AI-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform that helps CFOs and finance teams at mid-market and enterprise companies plan, forecast, and report with a spreadsheet-like interface. Founded in 2021 by former Google and Elevation Capital operators, it connects to 800+ business systems (ERP, CRM, HRIS, billing, data warehouses) and uses its Drive AI suite - model generation, an AI analyst, anomaly detection, and natural-language data transforms - to turn raw data into live financial models. In 2025 it shipped the first Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for finance, letting teams query permission-controlled financial data through assistants like Claude and ChatGPT.
HiWire
HiWire is a Silicon Valley advisory firm that helps early-stage startups offload three of the most time-consuming jobs a founder faces: recruiting senior talent, building investor-ready business and product plans, and raising money. Founded by Stanford-trained engineer and longtime recruiter Web Augustine, HiWire offers retained executive search for Director, VP and CEO roles at entrepreneur-friendly fees, contract sourcing, a rapid-turnaround program called SearchXeleration, and hands-on fundraising guidance including introductions to VCs and angel investors.
Abacum
Abacum is an AI-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform built for the office of the CFO. Founded in 2020 by former finance operators Julio Martinez and Jorge Lluch, it pulls financial and operational data into one place so finance teams can forecast revenue, model scenarios, plan headcount, automate reports, and trade spreadsheet drudgery for strategic decision-making. Backed by Scale Venture Partners, Atomico, Y Combinator and others, Abacum has raised over $90M and serves hundreds of mid-market companies across 31 countries, including Strava, Aiven, JG Wentworth and Mastercam.