I have been called the LeBron James of spreadsheets, but I try not to take myself too seriously
G
rowing up in Waterford, south-east Ireland, I was always good at maths. I first used Excel at university in Cork while studying maths and physics. We used a software programme called Mathematica but it was expensive, so at home I used Excel as a workaround to do the same tasks, using it to generate, say, a list of prime or Fibonacci numbers.
After that, I worked at a consultancy company in London and started using it more conventionally. I soon became the go-to person for people who had random questions about the software, such as how to use it to figure out how many trucks are needed to transport a certain amount of packages.
Later, I moved to New York to work at a bank, and in 2013 a colleague told me about a competition called ModelOff, which used Excel to build financial forecasts. There were 16 finalists in a conference room in one of Microsoft’s offices, all sitting at desks. It was a closed event and not very interesting to look at – a world away from what it eventually turned into.
