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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

#81
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3." Your funding slide heading right here.

He was at AWS for 5 years from 2015 to 2020. It seems unlikely that he wrote the filesystem that powers s3. Improved, absolutely. His partner was a manager, not an engineer, per https://www.geekwire.com/2024/former-aws-engineers-raise-3m-... Personally I don’t like this sort of puffery in funding slides nor announcements.

VCs invest in people and not products/ideas from what I have heard/read. I think it is imp. to mention that you were on the S3 team if you are building something like this. Huge credibility factor.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100%, but you still need to give them the option so they can transition from legacy to next-gen And we still haven't talked about keyboard navigation!

Ok, you're right – i don't think a smooth transition is possible in the office market – but I also don't think you can disrupt Office from within. Example: the thing that disrupted the New York Times was not a better newspaper, rather Facebook

I agree! Which is why I'm not building the next Excel, but rather something different which offers (or "will offer") ~feature parity with Excel spreadsheets but approaches knowledge work and document authoring from an entirely new angle

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#83

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 suppo…

For S3 specifically, we support IAM-based role assumption. If you go to Data > Import from Amazon S3 > Add S3 Bucket, you can grant our AWS account permissions to read an S3 bucket in your account.

We also have dedicated hosting options for our Enterprise tier.

If there's a specific data source you'd like us to support OAuth integration for, let me know, and we'll add it.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#84
Is the number crunching running fully locally via WASM? Or is it more of a websocket pushing commands thru to the backend type setup? I'm guessing the latter because of how fast the S3 import was but the former would be super interesting as well. Great demo!

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#85
post #84

Is the number crunching running fully locally via WASM? Or is it more of a websocket pushing commands thru to the backend type setup? I'm guessing the latter because of how fast the S3 import was but the former would be super interesting as well. Great demo!

All the compute happens in the cloud, you're exactly right about the websocket pushing commands.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#86
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We do not use customer data. From https://rowzero.io/security: "Row Zero does not use customer data for any purpose."

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#87
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. H…

> files are consistent and application-independent I see diverse, inhomogenous state schemas that are deeply coupled to the originating application (internal data structures serialized to disk!) and have arbitrary legacy structural constraints ("document") as well as seams between application silos

You’re talking about the file contents, not about files as objects.

Regarding the file contents, how is that different when the data is proprietarily stored in hidden SaaS databases?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#88
Is there a way to push data into it, rather than have it pull data from data sources? I have some use cases where users want <3s latency from source data updates to the display being refreshed. For reference, I managed to get to ~10s using Google Sheets' API.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#89

Make this a desktop app, and I'm sure you'll have a bunch of finance nerds like me waiting in line. This looks really well built.

Can you reach out to breck at rowzero.io? We've heard this a few times and would love to learn more about your use case.
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