Grammarly acquires Coda
coda.io
coda.io
> We discussed each of our paths to achieving this vision, and while both teams felt confident in their paths, it was obvious that we would move much faster together. The way that each of us has approached this market is different but inherently complementary. And so the conversation became... “What if we merged the companies?”
> Over the next few days, through discussions with Grammarly CEO (Rahul Roy-Chowdhury) and the co-founders (Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko) we started sketching out what a combined company would feel like: how the teams would fit together, where the products could immediately integrate and amplify, etc. And we also discussed the leadership structure, and agreed that I would lead the joint company as CEO.
> With a round of sushi and some sake, we shook hands — excited to work together on the future of AI.
—
The idea that any acquisition, but especially this one, was minted in this fashion is hilarious.
>> zuck pinged me to say "i'm not sure if this is a good idea yet, but i think maybe facebook should buy instagram, what do you think?" [0]
The next conversations also read as if they were happening over lunch, albeit with lawyers whispering approved language into each participant's ear [1]
[0] https://www.techemails.com/p/instagram-cofounder-on-mark-zuc...
Business people spend their entire day talking about their business, that's literally their job. Sometimes business opportunities come from random discussions. Sometimes they are more like arranged marriages. And just like with marriages, the story that is told to the public might not be the actual story.
I’m understanding your comment to suggest that you find money a clumsy tool for the purpose of allocating human effort and capital… I hope and suspect you have something broader and more elegant in mind than “money, but digital”!
For some reason Doctorow and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom comes to mind: https://craphound.com/down/download/
Joints
but seriously. We have enough to provide to all living people on earth. We do not need to work all day every day to consume. It is possible to create a society optimized for enjoyment where every living person has enough to have a fulfilling life.
We don't need to replace money, we need to make it less important. Something similar to 1 person, 1 vote that made modern democracies possible.
1. Money will communicate demand to continue, but not demand to stop. Until a profitable but harmful behavior is made illegal there's aren't many ways to stop it even if there's widespread consensus that it should be stopped.
2. It carries no metadata about its history. This means that when I accept a dollar from my employer I don't know what kind of behavior I'm acting in support of. If it's benign, the scarcity dynamics work ok and I should just take it because now I have a scarce thing to trade. But if it was issued to a mining company as part of a loan in support of some operation that's poisoning my drinking water, I'm better off refusing it and telling my employer to find me some cleaner money, otherwise I'm participating in my own demise.
Or maybe that's the same deficiency stated twice, I'm not sure.
I don't think blockchains are the right data structure so there's not much prior art to build on--but yes I do think money's successor will be modulated by software in some way--money being an information technology in the first place.
Lately when I take a crack at it it looks like a CRDT that stores debts and helps people find loops such that those debts can be nullified. If Alice owes Bob one and Bob owes Charlie one and Charlie owes Alice one, then the records of these debts can be purged without needing to settle in some far off clearing house or blockchain (supposing Alice, Bob, and Charlie are all on the same network partition). This buys you partition tolerance, which I think lends itself to something a little more difficult to use for exploiting people who don't know you.
There would be this lattice of trust relationships so you couldn't just waltz in to a poor village where nobody trusted you and expect to wield your foreign wallet to make the locals treat you like a god. If want something to "spend" with a remote population it would be based on some kind of proof you've done something that benefits them.
Mostly I'm just working on the software primitives you'd need, I'm not especially good at the degree of community-mindedness you'd need to do a good job with such a design. But when the time comes I hope to have helped provide the right person with the tools they need.
The only point I wish to make here is that for millennia we had to deal with whatever system the laws of physics handed us (the scarcity of gold and other substances was sufficient to build an economy around) but now we can write our own rules. Maybe it'll take us a few decades or centuries to kick the habit of thinking in the old way, but now that we have options... Well it seems unlikely to me that we wouldn't explore them, instead favoring Caesar's original design.
Well, in this case, the new CEO of the combined company is from Coda, so perhaps a little less likely than otherwise...
This acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge concern.
But it's high time Grammarly evolves itself into some other product or die trying.
Hold your beer, I built that https://chatgptwriter.ai
However, it is more expensive than Grammarly's annual plan and there is no Office app. I do like the different models, though, and it looks very polished.
Have you considered letting users add their own "writing tones"? I have a few Custom GPTs for different types of recipients. Perhaps your users would like such a feature.
Even better, I recently implemented the Prompt Template feature. You can create as many prompt templates as you like and insert them with one click. It's a recent feature, so the landing page is not updated, but you can try it for free (without adding a credit card) at https://chatgptwriter.ai/extension.
Leadership issue.
They switched from parse trees and rules to LLMs, presumably some things got better and some got worse
Then again, I can't imagine the struggle of having to rely entirely on libraries pre-internet
I have fond memories of looking up X, and going to the library and exploring the section where X was stored, along with all the books around it. this experience is dead now with their new "system". It's been about 20 years and I'm an old dog now with limited energy. but I would love to (if I were a political activist) do an expose story about how many books were checked out before this transfer was made vs after. I strongly suspect that a lot of knowledge was lost, just due to the friction of having to know which exact book you want, vs having the liberty to browse and freely select whatever you stumbled upon. and not all the info is online, now. due to licensing and copyright. Google Books tried to fight that, but lost. It's sad.
You could request a book be sent from another library, but that would take weeks, and you had no idea what was in that book.
It was wild. Most things were just unknown, or whatever you parents told you.
And how does ChatGPT differ?
… ChatGPT is good at improving grammar, but it doesn’t “understand” what it’s doing (by design), and doesn’t have a complete and consistent ruleset, which is what you want in a grammar checker. Also, grammar and style rules change with time, and you want to have good and precise control of what rules you’re applying.
Curious if anyone here uses it, and if so, what value it provides (I've been bombarded with its ads for years, but could never see what value it provides). Even a quick search of its website gives inanely basic examples (like correcting Ive to I've) [1].
[1] https://support.grammarly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047727871...
...and it's not like it improves his grammar or spelling - they're still terrible!
https://www.engadget.com/2018-02-06-grammarly-patches-seriou...
At that point you might as well include every OS because everything contains saved data and vulnerabilities. That’s extremely different than grammarly collecting and selling off private data that they promise is private.
If your competitors are trying to actively hack you and steal your data…
So yes, fancy autocorrect, but apparently better enough to matter for them.
I don’t pay for it anymore because I am more comfortable in my current company where I am sure my colleagues won’t be bothered by frequent mistakes and misspellings. Also, for the eventual more important text that I want to be grammatically perfect, there is free ChatGPT now.
With Grammarly it's right here in the text box as I am typing.
- "Together, we will build the AI-native suite of the future"
- "This represents an opportunity for dramatic acceleration of the Coda product and our mission"
- "We plan to weave the best of Coda and Grammarly together. It will combine your company knowledge, generative AI chat features, a full productivity suite, and hundreds of agents to help you work smarter"
- "We aim to redefine productivity for the AI era"
In my observation, this is much more common in the USA. In other countries, when using English, this is already less emphasized, and when some other language is used, the writing style becomes even less "exalted".
If anyone else thought of Panic, here's what happened with that Coda: https://panic.com/coda/
Pretty interesting twist. It’s almost as if Coda acquired Grammarly.
Just going through one right now; can't tell if the sickly sweet, positive executive speak is an act or they honestly believe it.
What's the difference?
A) we acquired a small (2 person) company for the people. Basically paid of their debt and they became employees. They gad experience in our domain space.
B) we acquired our distributer. We make product (hardware and software) and our (exclusive national) distributer went onto the market. We made an offer. We subsumed twice as many staff, and three times the offices.
Fast forward a decade later and the (combined) business has grown a lot, customers are better served, and there is more continuity from "farm to table".
So, from my perspective, your proposal to ban acquisitions seems to be painting with a very broad brush.
Equally, at the macro scale, there are regulatory controls in place. The recent denial of the T-mobile merger being a case in point.
For Coda this makes sense to kind of kickstart/boost their AI efforts.
But not immediately clear to me why Grammarly is interested in building their own doc builder tool?
>I am excited to share today that Grammarly agrees to acquire Coda
Whatever cool things Grammarly may do, the brand won’t work for me.