His obnoxiousness stands out even more in this crowd, which seems to skew introverted and mild-mannered. Nobody’s exactly competing for stage time with Lau’s antics. But as uncomfortable as everyone appears to be with his shtick, they also seem to understand his point. After all, these people do puzzles for fun and overwhelmingly do financial modeling for work. For all the fun art projects and life-tracking stuff that everyday people do in Excel, the true customers for these tools are the money guys. The ones who used the advent of the spreadsheet to turn Wall Street into a global industry, that built wildly complicated things like collateralized debt obligations and helped usher in a financial crisis in 2008. The world may not run on spreadsheets, but spreadsheets run the world. Maybe all Lau is doing is saying the quiet part out loud, which is surprisingly uneasy in a room full of finance professionals.
Abnormal Capitalist 