I saw a spread-sheet and database based presentation once where the assumptions were cooked on purpose -- so people were allowed to "test" their scenarios and prove to themselves that they couldn't *possibly* lose money investing in the project... sigh. Instead of the database they should probably have been investigating the start-ups administration, who helped teach me the meaning of "burnrate." This was also the demo where 2 of 5 "automated in depth web searches" were actually me querying a multiple search engines (something like dogpile) with my own search terms because neither the presenters nor the audience had any clue how to do searches.