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Grammarly acquires Superhuman

reuters.com

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Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#21

Post by hiddencost »

diggan wrote: post #17
atlantacrackers wrote: post #3

My history with email clients being acquired is not encouraging. The history is they are effectively abandoned and/or shut down on the order of weeks and months not years. See Dropbox/Mailbox.

> My history with email clients being acquired is not encouraging. Ignoring the constraint of "email client", has there been any acquisitions where the acquired product got better post-acquisition? I can think of countless examples where it got worse, but from the top of my head, I can only think of maybe YouTube, but then only in the initial post-purchase period, and same goes for a bunch of other examples. They see…

YouTube. Android. Google maps.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#22

Post by echelon »

dr_kretyn wrote: post #6

> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.

> Dry powder to do what?

This is a very common term for business people and especially investors and startups. It's a short phrase that carries a lot of meaning and packs a lot of punch.

Google Gemini:

> In finance, dry powder refers to readily available cash or liquid assets that a company, investor, or fund manager holds in reserve for future investments or to meet obligations during economic downturns. It's a metaphor, originating from the need to keep gunpowder dry for use in battle, symbolizing preparedness and flexibility in financial contexts.

> In essence, dry powder is unspent capital waiting to be deployed

This one term packs in all of that meaning into two words, so it is quite a useful tool. "Cash" alone doesn't have an implied context, whereas "dry powder" is immediately understood for strategy and positioning.

It's also nice to have analogies that are striking and evocative. It makes language fun and flowery instead of dusty and spartan. Business people have to business all day, and this injects a little flavor and excitement with wordplay. Drawing up images of 17th century battles is nice when the reality is emailing back and forth.

There lots of other phrases like this that you'll stumble upon. Someone should make a dictionary of these at some point.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#23

Post by turnsout »

dr_kretyn wrote: post #6

> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.

I guess that explains the Coda acquisition.

Honestly, I wonder what makes anyone think that Grammarly is the right centerpiece for an AI rollup?

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#24

Post by kylecordes »

burkaman wrote: post #16
dr_kretyn wrote: post #6

> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.

I don't know if it's uniquely American but I agree it is a very annoying term. It just means cash. Finance bros like to pretend they are "going into battle" or something when they go negotiate an acquisition, so the analogy is that you have a large store of gunpowder ready to deploy at a moment's notice when you want to go to war (go acquire a company).

On the plus side, when you're a seller, you want buyers who have this attitude. That they are going to war and the only way they can emerge victorious is by deploying an enormous amount in your direction. You want buyers who will brag to their friends about how much they spent.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#25

Post by dr_kretyn »

paulddraper wrote: post #12
dr_kretyn wrote: post #6

> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.

Dry powder as in gunpowder. Perhaps you are familiar with similar phrases “ammunition” and “war chest”?

You mean actual objects/entities or other financial terms?

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#27

Post by jgalt212 »

nwjsmith wrote: post #9
anilshanbhag wrote: post #5

Grammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it. Really wish there was an alternative that: 1) Does local processing (local LLM?) instead of sending all my data to their server. 2) Had a lightweight Chrome extension that didn't inject many MBs of scripts on each page.

Harper checks a lot of your boxes and is getting better all the time: https://writewithharper.com/

How does Harper compare with LanguageTool. We use a privately hosted version. It's better than nothing, but in practice it's more like a super-charged spell checker.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#28

Post by dr_kretyn »

burkaman wrote: post #16
dr_kretyn wrote: post #6

> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.

I don't know if it's uniquely American but I agree it is a very annoying term. It just means cash. Finance bros like to pretend they are "going into battle" or something when they go negotiate an acquisition, so the analogy is that you have a large store of gunpowder ready to deploy at a moment's notice when you want to go to war (go acquire a company).

From the context I figured this was more a "pancake mix" as they have the powder and now they just need to add water. You know, boyz be cookin'. Wouldn't figure out that this is some "war" analogy.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#29

Post by nemomarx »

dr_kretyn wrote: post #28
burkaman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's uniquely American but I agree it is a very annoying term. It just means cash. Finance bros like to pretend they are "going into battle" or something when they go negotiate an acquisition, so the analogy is that you have a large store of gunpowder ready to deploy at a moment's notice when you want to go to war (go acquire a company).

From the context I figured this was more a "pancake mix" as they have the powder and now they just need to add water. You know, boyz be cookin'. Wouldn't figure out that this is some "war" analogy.

it comes from "keep your powder dry" (ready) in the military sense, I think.

Re: Grammarly acquires Superhuman

#30

Post by NewsaHackO »

diggan wrote: post #7
anilshanbhag wrote: post #5

Grammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it. Really wish there was an alternative that: 1) Does local processing (local LLM?) instead of sending all my data to their server. 2) Had a lightweight Chrome extension that didn't inject many MBs of scripts on each page.

Feels like that'd be trivial to build, biggest issue is having to ship large files (LLM weights), but maybe CNNs would be enough, I'm guessing Grammarly started with CNNs or similar? What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.

I personally used to have a subscription for grammar checking, especially for longer papers. Now, I just use a LLM. I personally don’t see the strategic value of them pivoting to using genAI; there is no way I would pay $30 a month for something that will take at most 100k tokens using other LLMs. They seemed to have heavily downplayed their unique aspect which is the deterministic ruleset.
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