Alma Growth Hacks | Building a Financial Model Investors Trust with Sapna Shah
Financial models are one of the most important tools founders build and one of the most misunderstood.
Too often, early-stage models become overly complex spreadsheets built for investors rather than decision-making.
The result is wasted time, weak assumptions, and numbers nobody actually believes. In this session of Alma Growth Hacks, we’re joined by Sapna Shah for Building a Financial Model Investors Trust.
Sapna is a Venture Partner and Syndicate Lead at Sie Ventures, an Alma Angel, and a Fractional CFO to high-growth startups. She brings nearly two decades of financial leadership experience, working closely with founders on fundraising, forecasting, financial operations, and building scalable financial infrastructure.
This session will cover:
How to approach financial modelling as an early-stage founder
What investors actually look for in a model
Common mistakes founders make and how to avoid them
How to build assumptions that are realistic, defensible, and useful for decision-making
Sapna's move into venture capital and startup advisory builds on a 20-year track record in financial leadership, where she developed a structured, methodical approach to assessing business fundamentals, analysing growth potential, and building sustainable financial infrastructure.
⚠️ This session will NOT BE RECORDED.
The session will close with a live Q&A, so bring your financial modelling and fundraising questions 🔥
If you’re building a company and want your numbers to support better decisions, stronger fundraising conversations, and long-term credibility, this session is for you.
About the Alma Community
Innovation shapes the world we live in, but it isn't neutral. It shows up in products and services that don't serve, or sometimes even harm, half the population.
Alma is the venture community reshaping who builds, who funds and who benefits from innovation. With the target to generate $1 trillion in women-led wealth by 2050, where wealth is created on the cap table. We build the pipeline of women and girls on one side as capital allocators, and on the other as innovators.
Since December 2019, Alma has trained over 1,000 individuals and family offices to become angels. They have collectively backed 250+ ventures, now worth over $2 billion and scaling the breakthroughs the world urgently needs. With no fees or carry, Alma as a nonprofit takes a unique position in the ecosystem: not competing with syndicates and funds, but bringing everyone together to collaborate.
Alma Angels is committed to training 10,000 angels and backing 10,000 women founders by 2035.
We created this series because the most valuable insights in this ecosystem don’t come from polished panels or generic playbooks - they come from people actually in the trenches, testing things, breaking things, and learning fast.
Growth Hacks is designed to be:
Practical - real tactics, not theory
Honest - what worked, what didn’t, and why
Immediately useful - things you can take away and apply this week, not someday
Each session focuses deeply on one specific growth challenge.
Register now!
FREE TO JOIN