A Very Serious Newsletter

It kept showing up in our leadership meetings at Sandbox VR, week after week. It had a red number for burn, a line trending down, and the same warning every time: we were going too fast.

This was 2019. I was CPO, and everything felt like it was finally starting to work. Our stores were packed, and the experience felt magical. And with Series B on the horizon, the pressure was on to move faster: hire across functions, open more stores, repeat. We thought if we moved fast enough, we could own the entire category.

And every week, we didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t feel like something we could engage with. There was no fork in the road, no choice to make. Just: “Stop.”

Long before we hired a CFO, I’d built the model myself. It wasn’t standardized or anything, but it worked like a simulation. And it mapped to how I thought about the business. I knew exactly how to delay a store opening by 2 months, and instantly see the impact on cash. Or drop revenue by 15%, and understand what that meant for survival. The model told me what would happen and helped me reason through what to do. It helped me build intuition.

When our CFO joined, he immediately rebuilt my model the “right” way. Suddenly, it was GAAP-compliant, three-statement, with store-level detail. Something we could take to the board. But it wasn’t mine anymore.

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