A discounted cash flow (DCF) model answers one question: if you could see every dollar of cash this business will ever generate for its owners, what would that stream of cash be worth today?
The core idea. A dollar next year is worth less than a dollar today — you could invest today's dollar and have more than one dollar next year. So a DCF projects future cash flows, then "discounts" each one back to a present value using a required rate of return (the discount rate), and sums them all up.
Why Intrinsic uses a two-stage version. Nobody can credibly forecast a business's cash flows forever. The two-stage model projects explicit cash flows for 10 years (Stage 1), then assumes a single, much slower growth rate forever after (the terminal value) — concentrating your forecasting effort where it's most reliable, and being deliberately conservative about everything past that horizon.
What can go wrong. A DCF is only as good as its assumptions — small changes in growth rate or discount rate can swing the output dramatically. That's exactly why every assumption here is visible, editable, and defaults to a conservative anchor rather than a rosy one.