Grid
Spreadsheets are the most widely used (hundreds of millions of active users) computing, business logic, analytics, reporting and simple programming platforms available to the world’s knowledge workers. Yet the power of spreadsheets is being held back by their creation, interactivity, sharing and visualization paradigm which is from the ’80s and still hijacked by bundleware (eg MS office). With GRID a user can go “from spreadsheet to beautiful and interactive web report” through drag and drop. With live charts and data-linked text that allows for interactivity, link-based sharing, access management, versioning, etc. And because compute, logic and data models reside within GRID vs the spreadsheet, GRID can be the primary creation and consumption experience — but users can also continue to user their underlying spreadsheets and workflows if they wish.
GRID is creating an abstraction layer on top of spreadsheets (see types of spreadsheets) that unleashes trapped data, user creativity, insights and the ease of use of how analytics / reports are created, shared and interacted with. The goal is to democratize application building and web publishing to the average xls user. Whereas GRID is starting as an abstraction layer — it can morph into a platform that becomes the ‘go to place’ for creation and consumption as GRID documents have the data and logic layer included.
Our Thesis
By providing a bridge to the existing spreadsheet world, GRID can tap into the largest database, compute and analytics user base available — the xls knowledge worker. By empowering users to create much more insightful analyses / reports with significantly less effort — and with web-based / application style sharing (leading to virality) and interactive abilities, GRID could become the next generation interface and “building platform” on top of spreadsheets.
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