Richard Pham

Introducing ShortcutXL - your favorite spreadsheet agent is now available as a desktop generalist. Unlock Excel capabilities that no other spreadsheet agents can touch (VBA macros, What-if analyses, and more). Have a swarm of Shortcut agents work on dozens of models concurrently / in parallel. This is just a taste. try ShortcutXL now: npmjs.com/package/shortc…

For the second time now, @tryshortcutai was independently ranked as the top Excel AI agent in the world. We specifically build for the top analysts, and this matches what we see on the ground. It's firmly us, then Claude, or your firm forces Copilot upon you.

@TechFundies why wouldn't you use Claude for Excel (or better spreadsheet agents *wink wink*)? The limitation here is openpyxl. You're much better off directly using an agent that is special-built for excel work

Here is a screenshot of trying to get an Excel quicksheet working reliably in Claude. Again - just not great and not worth my time to recreate something I already have. Debugging dumb stuff that works elsewhere for my personal productivity is not a good use of time. Might be an analogy for why would enterprise users want to recreate parts of their job that are already working effectively? They should be working on deploying AI towards new stuff that could never be done before.

Random thoughts after connecting $FDS to Claude Chat / Cowork. My thinking is I want to approach AI as a typical user for investment advancement and use the learnings as a proxy for SaaS (as opposed to judging the impact of AI on FIG which I have never used before). Investment management likely downplays the importance of collaboration functionality in enterprise SaaS since most investment ideas are run from start to finish by a single person w/ just the end product being shared with a committee. 1. Connectors take Claude to a whole new level. By adding $FDS, I now get reliable data which takes my trust and application of AI much further. 2. Trying to replicate old, working things is frustrating. I tried to have Claude replicate my Excel quicksheet which is built with $FDS excel codes. It sort of worked but then I realized it was just very buggy and hard to get working as reliably as my spreadsheet. And then I asked myself why I was spending money and time working on rebuilding something that already works well. Same applies for $MSFT apps – can just connect to them and work on spreadsheets, emails, etc. 3. Building new stuff is easier and cool. I quickly prompted it to build an artifact that pulls the tech universe and helps me parse which businesses are accelerating. I then quickly prompted it to run the same analysis but by subsector. I think the data is likely correct and could quickly visualize the market’s enthusiasm for semis and avoidance of application software (see image). The new stuff is what I think everyone should be excited about. It’s new functionality, analysis, insights that can allow me or a business to advance and outperform competition. 4. The fastest, most efficient way to get to new functionality is via incumbent data / sw providers. I can pay more for $FDS MCP and am good to go. No change to existing processes or loss of procedure. Just ready to work on new things. I could purchase MCP from a smaller vendor but most of their data is incomplete right now. I could switch to CapIQ or Bloomberg but A) they are just as if not more expensive, B) Bloomberg doesn’t have an MCP yet, C) I would have to switch all the old stuff too / recontract which is just a waste of calories. 5. $FDS hasn’t had anything new to sell me ever. Now they do and it’s hot. Now maybe the flipside is the MCP can be swapped out for a competitor more easily which commoditizes the offering – particularly if all the old stuff moves entirely over to Claude over time but that seems very unlikely just given how people work (evidence: Bloomberg is the most legacy tech out there and has very low churn bc of habit). 6. Should I be paying more to access $FDS data via an MCP? Arguably not since it’s just another way to expose the same data and my usage of the terminal will likely lose share of time spent. But, whatever, the spend is a very low percentage of the business and not having it just seems stupid. Can you imagine meeting an investor and responding that you don’t have clean financial data in Claude because you’re too cheap (not to mention most funds expense this to the investor anyways!)? My point just being I think people are ultimately going to spend more to get more, and will be fine with it bc of the value add. I think the same thought process applies if I were starting a new firm – why would I want anything other than the most comprehensive data set to power my AI? Jeopardizing ROI to save a bit of money makes no business sense. 7. I did some market research. CapIQ said the inbound inquiries for their MCP is “through the roof, insane, etc.” w/ per seat pricing going up by 30-50%. $FDS per seat increases are probably similar to a bit less than that. 8. $FDS has been accelerating the past 3 qtrs w/ msd growth, and I would guess that continues given MCP ramp. Margins are a bit low while re-investing in product which is a sensible thing. Stock trades at 12x this year’s GAAP EPS / 12x FCF. Stock once traded down to 14x GAAP EPS in 2008 when the financial world was ending and finance professionals were being laid off. Stock has never had a worse peak-to-trough drawdown than now. And it’s never been this cheap. Please throw rocks at this.

a country of goblins in a datacenter

@HighyieldHarry @MaxxWithFaxx @tryshortcutai @nicochristie @MaxxWithFaxx you can either drop a zip into Shortcut or you can tell Shortcut you want to provide an API key for it to pull things in programmatically. x.com/tryshortcutai/…

@PE_Associate @HighyieldHarry @tryshortcutai try it out and lmk your thoughts! plenty to improve but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised :)

Man I love your content but surely you acknowledge that the model presented is below the standard/complexity of even a private equity interview case study. I’m sure these models will get to a stage where they can provide value add on excel modelling for actual deals but none of the current solutions (Shortcut, Mosaic, even Claude in Excel) can handle the complexity of a live deal model. Have spoken to 30+ PE associates across a range of firms on this and it is a genuine consensus view

I’ve been playing around with @tryshortcutai to see what I can have AI build for me and the end product is wild. I wanted to stress test Shortcut into building a master excel file for everything I would need for an investment committee. I had it build: 1) A 3-statement model 2) Toggles for multiple cases 3) Charts and tables for IC Memo must haves - revenue by segment, customer concentration, etc. 4) EBITDA Bridge charts 5) A Capital Structure chart You can pretty much have Shortcut model for you while you go and focus on the written parts of the IC Memo. Lmk if you’re interested in learning more, the key here is once you’re a wizard at prompting, the models are incredible.

@MaxxWithFaxx @tryshortcutai @nicochristie

@HighyieldHarry my favorite Warren Buffet quote

I’m launching a Private Credit fund and we’re actually going to lend to only software companies. While others zig, we zag.

GPT-5.5 is pretty incredible at working in spreadsheets! And this is the worst it will ever be. If you work in spreadsheets all day, see how much time it can save you in @tryshortcutai, or use it in our ChatGPT for Excel plugin: chatgpt.com/apps/spreadshe…

@amendandpretend @nicochristie Lmaoo that’s me fr 😂 @amendandpretend

@phamrich_ @nicochristie

We have been testing GPT 5.5 on the hardest spreadsheet tasks in the world (100k-1M+ cell complex models). It is the Pareto frontier for spreadsheets -- SOTA accuracy, the fastest and the most efficient public model across effort levels. OAI really cooked here

love hearing everyone's feedback on ShortcutXL @tryshortcutai

New onboarding flow for Shortcut. Always surprised how much training/onboarding is really needed. Took about 2h to build, definitely feels like Opus 4.7 is a much stronger design eng than 4.6.

@cwkdotone it's in the works!

@phamrich_ Any plans for CLI on macOS?

Introducing ShortcutXL - your favorite spreadsheet agent is now available as a desktop generalist. Unlock Excel capabilities that no other spreadsheet agents can touch (VBA macros, What-if analyses, and more). Have a swarm of Shortcut agents work on dozens of models concurrently / in parallel. This is just a taste. try ShortcutXL now: npmjs.com/package/shortc…

@fergonz1993 we gotchu!

@phamrich_ Ooooooohhhhhhh shhhh I finally got it. I didn't understand the terminal thing and why vs the excel add in, omg I can have the excel live and open and feeding with data and agents and working live in the OPEN Excel?! At first I didn't get it this is fire

@macwalter_ ...but better

@phamrich_ “Claude code for excel…” 👀👀👀

@nicochristie so free

@phamrich_ Free game

@tryshortcutai created by the brilliant @BrainsAndTennis