Congrats on the launch Dave! I was wondering who was going to launch an attempt at industry standard here. Hope it gains widespread adoption.
741 karma · joined February 17, 2011
I moved to San Francisco on February 1st 2011 with a desire to build a better Internet. I'd like to think I'm making progress.
I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.
I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.
Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.
This is less of a latency/efficiency thing and more about disconnecting the eyes from a screen and fingers from a keyboard. The upside is more walking, flow and creativity.
The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".
This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.
For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance.
Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!
For now, one fun experience is loading the app on Mobile and just talking to your database. It's the same as talking from a desktop but can feel far more natural and the form factor let's you get quick business answers on the go.
The main things we bring to the table are that the AI can write code and handle much larger datasets than fit in ChatGPT, etc., and also that Superagents you can pipe your data in without code or SaaS interface kludge, so you can ask much more complicated questions than you usually might if you're not great at cleaning, filtering or analyzing data.
From there, San Francisco looks quite small, but many neighborhoods are worlds away from the action - Outer Richmond is not the density of networks you are looking for, for example (better than rest of world, suboptimal for SF).
Co-locating close to the center of these dense founder networks is the best way maximize luck and opportunity.
This map isn't perfect, but it makes it pretty obvious where you should move if you're interested in startups.
Career wise, moving to "the center of the network" is still the best decision I ever made.
We're looking for one Product Marketer to join our team in a part-time contract capacity in the Bay Area (San Francisco preferred). The requirement are that you need to be great at video storytelling and also be strong at spreadsheets & analysis.
Everyone on our team codes, and you should too. There's no technical requirement for the role, per-se, but we have found it is better this way.
Email me if this sounds interesting.
Big props to Joseph Wilson (@pseudo-r) who maintains the unofficial ESPN API. https://github.com/pseudo-r/Public-ESPN-API. Reliably the best service for interacting with fantasy sports data and AI.
This was an interesting project to work on, mainly because the quality and popularity of API docs for various services really does impact the experience of untrained LLMs using them out of the box. It was fun to experience this outside of our regular B2B context, and my big takeaway from this project was just how much people are underestimating the importance of this as we experience the rise of the agentic web over the next 3 years. (Agents are users too!)
We included some easter egg cricket features, but we haven't found a free service the AI likes enough to bundle that in officially yet, so that'll come at a later date. (We're Aussies, so of course the fantasy Cricket analysis will improve over time : )
Agents are users now, and agent-friendly docs and libraries will be standard practice for the tools that want to thrive through broader industry adoption.
Similarly, perhaps you wouldn't care if your website wasn't easily parsable by crawlers, but if you'd like your work to appear in search results you might like to include a sitemap or structure the HTML a little.
Most people use it for analysis and ops work, + data science.
I find myself using Sourcetable to run our company: query the DB, analyze the user data, make projections, write copy, help with technical SEO (search the web, scrape data, check status codes, clean my sitemap, run vector space analysis etc.), talk to apps, financial modeling for our operating model + forecasting, etc.
The main idea I'm thinking about is LLM related: we're all having a social experience with machines (!) while building the machines (!!). I'm not sure my brain fully grasps that it's talking to silicon while I work.
We're building a spreadsheet-based operating system for the web, although on first touch Sourcetable feels more like Excel Copilot or "Cursor for spreadsheets".
We're looking for one Product Marketer to join our team in a part-time contract capacity in San Francisco. The requirement are that you need to be great at video storytelling and also be strong at spreadsheets & analysis.
Everyone on our team codes, and you should too. There's no technical requirement for the role, per-se, but we have found it is better this way.
Email me if this sounds interesting.
Although not completely analogous, helping people is similar to gifting. In gifting societies, we don't give to someone with the expectation of a direct benefit in return (A -> B, B -> A). Instead, it's more of a long arc that goes around a corner and returns in an indirect sense (A --> B --> C --> ... --> A).
When you layer time succession in, helping others progresses more like the circle of life. It often doesn't make sense to give back directly — your professors are already at the peak of their careers — but we can give back to society. In doing so, we increase the resonance of the gift that was given.
Often, the role of the receiver is simply to receive. On the other hand, Tuesdays with Morrie is a book that speaks to a gentler form of directly giving back to elders as they age.
Sourcetable is the world's most capable AI spreadsheet (think: "Cursor for spreadsheets"). We're a small team of experienced engineers, the company is growing quickly, and and we're looking for an experienced product educator to make videos and blogs on everything spreadsheet, data, analysis, and AI related. Personality wise, you could be a fit if you're something of a combination YouTuber, hacker, and ex-Goldman Sachs spreadsheet junkie.
Although it isn't definitionally required for the role, everyone on the team codes and ideally you do too. We have found it works better that way.
If you are considering applying, please email me a body of work.
-- Eoin (founder)
Sourcetable is building a spreadsheet-based analyst. Talk to the computer, tell it what you want done, and it does the work for you.
This is a new UX, and we're looking for a great product educator to join our team to tell that story and show people how it's done.
You need to be exceptional at making product education videos. These particular videos will be related to using AI for spreadsheet analysis and ops work, flexing up into leveraging any python library you can think of for analysis and other shenanigans. That's the gig.
If you need a lot of guidance it will not be a good fit.