Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 90 posts

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#61

Post by mritchie712 »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #49
refrigerator wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We didn’t have an end goal in mind from the beginning — we had the idea for the product and wanted to see if it had legs as a business, and then grow it and see where we could take it. From what I recall, I don’t think this kind of acquisition was on our radar in the early days — we expected the startup game to be much more binary (massive outcome or bust), and this was the standard narrative at the time. We’…

> We’re fortunate to have landed in a middle ground that more founders should be aware of earlier on (and I think awareness is increasing). You mean the area 97% of businesses who don't go bust operate? I think most business owners are well aware of it. For some reason though, startup founders live in a different reality.

I think they meant the middle ground of an exit that is:

1. small by vc standard

2. still life changing for founders & employees

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#62

Post by sails »

refrigerator wrote: post #56
sails wrote: post #52

Congrats! Do you think the US flip made a meaningful difference (presuming you did it for US customer/investor access)? Lucanet is EU, so maybe it complicated it in the end

We started as a US company in 2019 to make fundraising easier, and I think this did have a material impact. It's operationally quite annoying, but chances are that we would have had to do it eventually, to efficiently employ US people without paying Deel extortionate fees

Thanks! Any tips for optimising the operational process? Most impactful thing that you did to reduce friction?

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#63

Post by Lukas1994 »

obeavs wrote: post #42

Nice work! What was the hardest technological part about building the product?

Probably building our calculation engine - you can read more about it here https://www.causal.app/blog/scaling

Rendering grids/tables/charts in the browser is also quite tricky if you want it to be fast!

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#64

Post by romanhn »

orliesaurus wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't do this stuff here.

Can you clarify?

Please don't post ChatGPT-generated text on HN. You're very likely to be downvoted/flagged, which is what happened here. People here are capable of using ChatGPT themselves, and most of that text is not interesting in the HN sense.

Separately, I think the answer was clear to most people - they did better than other well-paying alternatives (meaning it wasn't a poor outcome / waste of effort from individual perspective), but they're not going to share the specifics.

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#65

Post by orliesaurus »

romanhn wrote: post #64
orliesaurus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify?

Please don't post ChatGPT-generated text on HN. You're very likely to be downvoted/flagged, which is what happened here. People here are capable of using ChatGPT themselves, and most of that text is not interesting in the HN sense. Separately, I think the answer was clear to most people - they did better than other well-paying alternatives (meaning it wasn't a poor outcome / waste of effort from individual perspectiv…

Oh I didn't know there was a rule about that - I was just trying to save people a click or two. Noted for the future!

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#66

Post by paddy_m »

obeavs wrote: post #47

If you did it again, would you use AG-Grid, or would seek to own the table with something like Tanstack Table?

Curious to hear about other people's experience with Tanstack. I built a complex app [1] around AG-Grid and here are my thoughts:

I would recommend AG-Grid for most data apps until a well supported alternative comes out. My understanding is that Tanstack Table is aimed at generic apps that happen to have a table. Perspective's [2] table component is most likely more capable than AG-Grids, but it needs significantly more documentation and examples.

AG-Grid has a particular way of building things that seems to map to well to pulling data from a database or basic webservice. AG-Grid works very well for this use case. The AG-Grid enterprise features are built around this type of data model too.

If your data is small enough to fit into memory (less than 50 MB), it works very well. AG-Grid doesn't have a connector to arrow or parquet (I will eventually write my own). For larger datasets JSON generation and parsing performance bottlenecks. Additionally Parquet/Arrow offers much better types.

Configuring AG-Grid is tricky, especially when you want config to be declarative. If you want to define your own custom rendering components, getting them to work properly per column when you want different renderers for pinned rows is tricky (my solution [3])

Support for the community version of AG-Grid is practically non-existent. I understand that they have an enterprise business model that charges for support. They don't seem to be interested in answering community bug reports or comments, even for generically relevant bugs.

I have a decent amount of trust in AG-Grid's community offering [4], I don't see them cannibalizing community features to put them in their enterprise offering. Their enterprise features are the main development focus of the team, particularly the charts. The charts offering isn't impressive compared to bokeh, plotly, or vega. It would work for line of business apps, but not for a userbase familiar with better analytic platforms.

All that said. AG-Grid has excellent documentation and examples. They examples are swappable between Javascript, Typescript, React, and Angular.

[1] https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo

[2] https://github.com/finos/perspective

[3] live example https://buckaroo-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/#/DF...

[4] https://blog.ag-grid.com/javascript-jabber-podcast/

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#67

Post by paddy_m »

karimdaghari wrote: post #58
obeavs wrote: post #47

If you did it again, would you use AG-Grid, or would seek to own the table with something like Tanstack Table?

Not op but having been in a situation where I was facing the choice between ag-grid and Tanstack Table, I'd say, without hesitation : Tanstack Table. What you may "lose" in advanced features, you gain in flexibility!

Could you give some examples?

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#68

Post by jjordan »

karimdaghari wrote: post #58
obeavs wrote: post #47

If you did it again, would you use AG-Grid, or would seek to own the table with something like Tanstack Table?

Not op but having been in a situation where I was facing the choice between ag-grid and Tanstack Table, I'd say, without hesitation : Tanstack Table. What you may "lose" in advanced features, you gain in flexibility!

Tanstack Table is a nice primitive to build upon, but ag-grid is in a league of its own in terms of feature set.

Re: Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN

#69

Post by Lukas1994 »

sails wrote: post #62
refrigerator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We started as a US company in 2019 to make fundraising easier, and I think this did have a material impact. It's operationally quite annoying, but chances are that we would have had to do it eventually, to efficiently employ US people without paying Deel extortionate fees

Thanks! Any tips for optimising the operational process? Most impactful thing that you did to reduce friction?

If you want to do it properly you need to setup an inter-company loan agreement, transfer pricing, you need accountants and tax specialists for both UK and US, ... so the costs will definitely be significant. I don't think there are any shortcuts. Ideally, you find an accountant that is familiar with this setup.
Post reply on HN