First-time founders waste 3-4 weeks building a financial model in a format VCs won't actually read

A first-time B2B founder spends weeks building a detailed bottom-up financial model in Excel with 15+ tabs, unit economics breakdowns, and cohort analyses before their seed round. So what? VCs at seed stage spend less than 3 minutes on a financial model and care almost exclusively about market size narrative and team. So what? The founder has now burned a month of runway on an artifact that doesn't move the needle on getting a term sheet. So what? That month could have been spent closing two more design partners or shipping a key feature that would have been far more persuasive than any spreadsheet. So what? The founder's pitch becomes over-indexed on financial projections rather than customer pain and traction, which is what actually converts at seed stage. So what? They get passed on by partners who perceive them as 'spreadsheet founders' rather than customer-obsessed operators, and they never understand why they got rejected because no VC gives that feedback directly. This problem persists structurally because accelerator curricula and online fundraising courses teach financial modeling as a universal prerequisite, without distinguishing what matters at seed vs. Series A vs. Series B. YC partners have said publicly that they barely look at projections, but the cottage industry of fundraising advisors keeps selling model templates because that's what they can productize.