Hollywood prepared me for something different.

Every Indian character in every film I watched growing up could solve equations in their head, build rockets on a napkin, and make Wall Street look slow. I carried those expectations into every collaboration with my Indian colleagues.

I have since updated those expectations.

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Three fonts. Two of them bold. A “profit margin” calculated by subtracting cost from selling price, then dividing by cost — which is markup. These are not the same thing. They have been not the same thing since math was invented.

I don’t have an accounting degree. But that afternoon, I felt like a Harvard professor of finance — which tells you everything you need to know about how that meeting went.

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Tax was next. In markets where taxes stack — GST on top of withholding on top of service tax — I’ve watched confident salespeople freeze mid-sentence. Not because they didn’t know. Because the number changed depending on who was asking and what mood the spreadsheet was in.

“We’ll confirm the final amount.”

Reader, they did not confirm the final amount.

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The Google Sheet phase deserves its own chapter.

I started with ambition. Filters. Conditional formatting. A dropdown for campaign status. A formula that would auto-calculate remaining budget like I was running a Fortune 500 operation.

I now consider it a personal victory when every cell uses the same font size. I have lowered the bar. The bar and I are at peace.

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Different markets prioritize different things. The energy that doesn’t go into spreadsheet precision often goes somewhere far more interesting: the pitch, the vision, the PowerPoint with forty-seven slides that somehow makes you believe everything is possible.

The follow-through is a separate meeting.

(It is always a separate meeting.)