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Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

rowzero.io

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Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#61

Post by chadash »

breckognize wrote: post #2

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 choic…

What I'd love to see is an easy workflow to make this supplant Google docs. Right now, let's say i want a shared spreadsheet. I need to:

1) Signup for an account

2) Create a workbook

3) Click share and put in friend's email

4) They get an invite

5) Now they need to sign up

6) They can edit my doc

I'm not a paying customer (or even a user... I just heard of this), so take this with a grain of salt, but what I'd love to see is a super-friction-less way for me to share a doc and make it editable without others needing accounts. Cut out as many steps as possible above. Doing this can be a great tool for marketing... what's better marketing than easily collaborating on a spreadsheet on a site that my friend is already using and that already looks very similar to tools I'm familiar with?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#62

Post by nickjj »

breckognize wrote: post #36
nickjj wrote: post #22

At the time of this comment (edit: since this comment, they addressed this, check the replies), on your pricing page you have "SOC 2 Type II Security Compliance" not being checked off on the free tier but it's checked in the others. The same thing applies to "HIPAA Compliant and BAA" except this isn't enabled for free and pro plans. What makes the free tier different here? Are you storing free data in a different are…

There's no difference in how data is stored or processed between the tiers. We updated our pricing page to address the confusion. We only provide the SOC 2 report or BAA for Business accounts.

Thanks, I do see a difference now. Both compliance types are checked on the free tier.

Can you please answer the question about how our data is viewed and or used internally?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#63

Post by warkdarrior »

chadash wrote: post #61
breckognize wrote: post #2

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 choic…

What I'd love to see is an easy workflow to make this supplant Google docs. Right now, let's say i want a shared spreadsheet. I need to: 1) Signup for an account 2) Create a workbook 3) Click share and put in friend's email 4) They get an invite 5) Now they need to sign up 6) They can edit my doc I'm not a paying customer (or even a user... I just heard of this), so take this with a grain of salt, but what I'd love t…

This feature would be the fastest way for the company to have the least number of paying users. As a user, I'd pay for one account and then share new spreadsheets with anyone who asks for one on the Internet.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#64

Post by strongpigeon »

gamegoblin wrote: post #57
strongpigeon wrote: post #35

As someone who used to work on Excel, awesome work and congrats on the launch! I get that it's easy to bash on VBA, but I'd argue it's what made Excel what it is today (though maybe not the language/runtime per se, but rather the ergonomics). I feel pretty confident saying that probably 5% of the world's economy runs on VBA macros that were started by some eager worker that was tired of doing repetitive tasks and won…

I want to hear more about this self-rewriting VBA macro

From what I remember (that was almost almost 10 years ago, so a bit foggy now), it was some finance/trading people (the crazier stuff is always from finance people) that were doing some optimization work and found they had better performance by putting back the values in the macro itself and rerunning it. Something to that effect. (Or was it for versioning? I forgot the details honestly)

I think they were using file system calls with some tools to rewrite the file directly. But IIRC it's possible to do it just via the API.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#65

Post by [deleted] »

gamegoblin wrote: post #57
strongpigeon wrote: post #35

As someone who used to work on Excel, awesome work and congrats on the launch! I get that it's easy to bash on VBA, but I'd argue it's what made Excel what it is today (though maybe not the language/runtime per se, but rather the ergonomics). I feel pretty confident saying that probably 5% of the world's economy runs on VBA macros that were started by some eager worker that was tired of doing repetitive tasks and won…

I want to hear more about this self-rewriting VBA macro

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#66

Post by breckognize »

samstave wrote: post #56
pimlottc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * but spreadsheets on the browser always represent an inferior UX What do you mean by this? Inferior to a standalone app? Inferior to some other design in general?

For certain apps, it feels much more comfortably mentally compartmentalized when that focus is not in browser... (this is just my opinion), but I find that I typically have so many tabs open - I like to have certain things on not my browser (at times a tab can crash the whole browser) Attempting to import from various sources (urls and upload) and it fails: https://i.imgur.com/YV865bw.png It also stalls for a really…

We wrote our own CSV parser to get fast import performance, and we do occasionally encounter novel encodings and weirdness. I sent you an e-mail to get more details.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#67

Post by layer8 »

dustingetz wrote: post #55
airstrike wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has the benefit of having all of Google drive around it But even then, the benchmark is Excel. Nearly every Excel user is saving files to disk. Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Maybe making networked drives better is another problem that needs solving, but I don't think spreadsheet applications should disregard that and just hope everyone moves to online. At a minimum you should give…

> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work! pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!

The benefit of files is that they are a consistent, application-independent abstraction. You can copy, move, rename, backup, version, and generally organize them however you want, restrict or grant access, without being constrained by what the respective application supports. Importantly, you can organize files from different applications together without those applications having to know anything about each other. Hyperlinks are no substitute for the object-like, independent nature of files.

Applications that are not based on files create their own little separate universe, or rather island, that isn’t really interoperable.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#68

Post by gamegoblin »

strongpigeon wrote: post #64
gamegoblin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to hear more about this self-rewriting VBA macro

From what I remember (that was almost almost 10 years ago, so a bit foggy now), it was some finance/trading people (the crazier stuff is always from finance people) that were doing some optimization work and found they had better performance by putting back the values in the macro itself and rerunning it. Something to that effect. (Or was it for versioning? I forgot the details honestly) I think they were using file…

As the guy who wrote most of the Row Zero backend engine, I pray to god I am never asked to implement anything like this :)

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#70

Post by Terretta »

breckognize wrote: post #2

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 choic…

Starting from a place of "I want to start providing this to my employees yesterday"...

I can't see how to adopt this at an info-sec minded financial services firm that would otherwise love to pay you for it.

For example, the docs show the product wants static creds for a Postgres database or signed URL for S3 bucket instead of leveraging best-practice service-to-service identity and access management.

Maybe you support what I want, and I didn't find it at first glance.

This either ...

(a) needs to support modern dynamic or token-based authentication (e.g. Oauth2.0 client credentials grant, JWT, or for enterprises ideally CSP native IAM in Azure/GCP/AWS such as share S3 by cross account bucket permissions policy instead of signed URL, etc.), or ...

(b) allow firms to operate this themselves so the spreadsheet is run in the firm's security context, no creds are shared and data never leaves.

As you are running in AWS, providing this to run in AWS IAM context could solve it, but it's likely worth your time collaborating closely with FS firms that have solved cloud-native infosec at scale for the world's most demanding regulatory environments such as GSIFIs/GSIBs, since if you can do that, it's secure for anyone. Similar for HIPAA or FedRAMP.

If your customers can be fully best practice compliant within these regulatory regimes without having to lower their standards or get exceptions to use you, then it's above the bar for pretty much everyone.

// Full disclosure: Although using all 3 of AWS, Azure, and GCP, I was an AWS CAB member for half a decade (as principal engineers you likely know what this means), with a native-AWS preference.

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