Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

Founder/CEO here.

When I worked in AWS S3, I spent a lot of time in Excel. Even as a dev, it was the fastest way to explore data, build models, and share forecasts with business partners. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choice, so 3 years ago I started working on it.

Today we're launching Row Zero. Row Zero looks and feels like Excel and Google Sheets, but 100-1000x faster. You can easily import gigabytes of CSV, JSONL, and Parquet files or connect directly to Snowflake, Redshift, Postgres, and S3. We also support Python natively. You can call Python functions that return pandas data frames and manipulate the results directly in the spreadsheet.

Under the hood, Row Zero is a high-performance columnar engine written in Rust. Running in AWS lets us scale compute up and down and import quickly from S3 and Snowflake. When you open a workbook, we place it in the AWS region closest to you so it feels as snappy as a desktop application.

The app is built by 5 ex-principal engineers from Amazon S3, Tableau, and Airtable. We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3.

We've been in beta for a year. Use us to refine big CSVs, build complex financial models, create dashboards, and share large data sets. We're also a killer Snowflake/Postgres client. Give us a try and let us know what you think.

I was especially excited to learn that RZ is built on Apache Arrow internally, which makes it easy to integrate with other Arrow-based applications and the emerging "Composable Data Stack". Really exciting stuff, they're just getting started!

This looks really promising, and I love that you make a demo available with no account. But I don't have time to track down some sample data to test it with.

I'm guessing this post is going to the front of HN. If you've got some sample data, you should put it into the demo sheet ASAP. Or at the very least, provide some links to s3 files the user can manually add to test it themselves.

Oh, cool! I saw that menu option but I didn't click it since I assumed I'd have to enter some details. I'll check it out. Thanks :)

"We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3."

Your funding slide heading right here.