breckognize

I don't know enough about QuickBooks to say we can replace it. But we do have enterprise accounting teams using us to pivot millions of rows of general ledger data. So if you're looking to (e.g.) create summaries of categorized expenses, we're great for that.

Where are you importing your financial data from?

We have development desktop builds. A few product questions for you:

Would you be ok with a new file format or do we need to save to .xlsx?

How important is Python in a desktop version? Would you need integration with conda or virtualenv?

How much do you think we should charge?

Sounds like a bug, but I'm having trouble reproducing. If you share repro steps with breck at rowzero.io, we'll get it fixed.

Equals and Row Zero are in the same space. They've put more effort into their suite of cloud data connectors, while we've focused on performance and first class Python support. We'll be adding more connectors in the coming months.

Yes, Excel compatible: https://rowzero.io/docs/spreadsheet-functions

If we're missing any formulas you need, message me at breck at rowzero.io and we'll add them (usually within 24 hours).

Nothing in particular. I'd have been happy with anything that has a real open source community around it, which VBA doesn't. For data tasks, Python's a natural choice. We've also had requests for R, which is on our roadmap.

The reason we launched a hosted product first is to get around the chicken and egg problem you describe. You can create a workbook and just share a link with a colleague - they don't have to install anything. If you turn on link-sharing under the workbook's "Share" menu, they don't need an account either. The cloud also provides some powerful performance advantages.

The spreadsheet DAG is derived from the formulas. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding!

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.

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

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.

After you create a workbook, click the checkbox under Share > Anyone with link can view. Then your friend doesn't need to create an account.

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.

We're a spreadsheet-first UI. If you're familiar with the Microsoft suite, we're more like a hosted Excel plus Power Query, but way easier to use.

Row Zero supports Python pandas, which handles multi-dimensional data. So you can process your data with Pandas in the code window and then view "2d slices" of that data in the spreadsheet UI. Feel free to message me at breck at rowzero.io if you'd like to do a session together to get you started.

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.

When we claim 100x faster than desktop Excel, we're looking at supported row counts, import speeds from Snowflake, and time to drag large XLOOKUPs. We'll do a deep dive on performance in another blog post next week. Stay tuned!

We've got some sample data sets in S3 if you go to Data > Import from Amazon S3. The bucket rowzero-public-datasets has some neat ones.

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 choice, so 3 years ago I started working on it.

Today we're launching Row Zero. Row Zero looks and feels like Excel and Google Sheets, but 100-1000x faster. You can easily import gigabytes of CSV, JSONL, and Parquet files or connect directly to Snowflake, Redshift, Postgres, and S3. We also support Python natively. You can call Python functions that return pandas data frames and manipulate the results directly in the spreadsheet.

Under the hood, Row Zero is a high-performance columnar engine written in Rust. Running in AWS lets us scale compute up and down and import quickly from S3 and Snowflake. When you open a workbook, we place it in the AWS region closest to you so it feels as snappy as a desktop application.

The app is built by 5 ex-principal engineers from Amazon S3, Tableau, and Airtable. We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3.

We've been in beta for a year. Use us to refine big CSVs, build complex financial models, create dashboards, and share large data sets. We're also a killer Snowflake/Postgres client. Give us a try and let us know what you think.

Shoefitr - Software Engineer - Pittsburgh, PA

1 in 3 shoes bought online is returned, and 65% of the time it's for fit-related reasons. We think that's super lame. That's why we make software that helps online shoppers get the right size the first time. Our customers include Nordstrom, New Balance, and Netshoes.com, and our app is served to more than 15 million uniques / month. We’re looking for a talented, full-stack engineers to help us shape the future of Internet apparel retail.

You will join a talented engineering and design team that has worked on everything from Microsoft's C++ compiler to the Linux TCP implementation. We think you'll learn a lot from us, and we look forward to learning a lot from you.

You’ll work with us to build out our product offering for footwear and apparel retailers as well as a stand-alone retail site. You’ll be responsible for architecting, implementing, testing, and deploying new features and applications. We expect you to be a "full-stack" programmer – someone who’s comfortable hacking in Javascript one day and C# the next.

Please apply at http://shoefitr.com/careers.php

CMU CS alum and Pittsburgh resident here. While $1.17 billion would more than double the university's endowment, it's hard to be excited about this. I don't understand how this settlement is remotely proportional to the damage Marvell could have done to CMU.

This case was also decided by a Pittsburgh jury, which doesn't seem right.

If you decide to do footwear and need help with the sizing (or want to help your customers switch from other brands into yours), we're happy to help! (www.shoefitr.com)

Pittsburgh: Technical Generalist / Front-End Engineer at Shoefitr

We make software that helps online shoe shoppers find the best-fitting shoe. We’re looking for a talented front-end engineer to help us shape the future of Internet apparel retail.

You will join a talented engineering and design team that has worked on everything from Microsoft’s C++ compiler to high frequency trading algorithms. We think you’ll learn a lot from us, and we look forward to learning a lot from you.

You’ll work with us to build out our product offering for footwear and apparel retailers. This will involve working with our designers to make UX decisions, prototyping experimental features, and building reusable Javascript components to simplify development. We expect you to be a “full-stack” programmer, but most of your time will be spent developing the user-facing pieces.

About you: - BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience. - Mastery of JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Experience with other dynamically-typed languages a plus. - A product portfolio that demonstrates you can build and maintain incredible user experiences. - Excited to learn any technology we throw at you.

Bonus points if: - You love shoes. Like, seriously. - You enjoy conducting user tests. - You’ve run a marathon (or at least a 5k).

Benefits: - Stock options - Market salary - 4 weeks vacation - Allowance to pick your own hardware

Please apply through our website at http://shoefitr.com/careers.php

We were at SuperConf last year (as one of the presenting companies) and got tremendous exposure. If you're a pre-series A start up, this is a perfect conference to practice your pitch at and to meet cool people. The speakers were also fantastic. This year's line up looks even better.

Hey, I'm one of the Shoefitr co-founders. The demo on the homepage assumes you're buying the Asics GT-2150 and just need to know what size to buy (and how it will feel). You can try it for all sorts of running shoes at http://www.runningwarehouse.com. Suggesting new products based on what you currently wear will be rolling out soon...

Am I the only one who thinks their business is completely indefensible? I haven't read their patent applications, but I'd be shocked if you can patent not showing information. What they've done is definitely clever, but it seems to me that the big guys could have one decent designer and UI person duplicate their entire business in a week.

I should add that I've already booked 3 flights through Hipmunk and recommended it to a bunch of friends. I hope I'm wrong.

I'm going to take the opposite view and suggest that this is not a good idea. While I whole-heartedly endorse bootstrapping when you can, there is a huge risk to not having a professional look at your incorporating documents, especially when there are multiple co-founders involved. That's why this is the first thing incubators like YC and AlphaLab require. Many attorneys (if you ask) will do incorporation for a flat fee (ours was $2500).

Specifically our attorney helped us with the following issues:

- What is the structure of the shareholder agreement?

- What happens if a co-founder leaves?

- Filling out the 83(b) Election Form (so that you pay capital gains taxes on the shares you're about to be issued now rather than later)

- Mutual confidentiality agreement amongst co-founders

- Proprietary rights agreement

Believe me, I know what it's like to be a starving startup. Any cash outlay is terrifying. But you must be able to separate fear from the decision making process. $2500 is not a lot of money. And if you can't bring yourself to pay that much for something as important as an attorney, are you really starting a business? Or is it just a side project that you hope will become a business? There is a serious difference.

One last thought. We (http://www.shoefitr.com) didn't incorporate until we quit our "real" jobs to go full time. This gave us time to mitigate some technology risk and get comfortable working with each other before shelling out $2500. I think that's ok too. But if you're at the full-time stage of things, consult a professional.

I graduated from CMU CS in 2009 and chose to start up instead of doing grad school (http://www.shoefitr.com). We were funded by AlphaLab and are still based in Pittsburgh.

I, too, was looking to work on something cool and new, and you can certainly find projects that meet this criteria in both startups and academia. The decision for me was easy because I was passionate about the idea, and I was excited to start building. The serious thesis work in grad school would still have been a couple years away, and I wasn't as excited about taking more classes. I wanted to get started immediately.

If you'd like to grab lunch and talk more about the start-up world, I'd be happy to try and lend my perspective. (My co-founders and I live in Shadyside).

One really cool startup in this space is cloudfab.com (AlphaLab '08). They're a platform/market for the mass customization the article describes.

Isn't all for-profit news suspect? Free market advocates would argue that, over time, people will realize that certain news agencies aren't accurate and would then pay (either with their wallets or their eyeballs) for the more reliable news sources. The unreliable sources would go out of business, leaving us with only reliable, fact-checked news.

Of course, the problem with this is that people's metric for "good" news isn't what's accurate - it's what's most entertaining. Or, in the case of Fox, whatever reinforces their existing world view. Market forces don't create reliable news - they create sensational reporting.

This is unfortunate because a reliable free press is critical for democracies to function. Perhaps for-profit news is as fundamentally flawed as for-profit healthcare.