6 ms·
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 forec
by breckognize 3y ago
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.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoExcel 2010 is several times faster than the latest Excel versions. What are the performance metrics compared to Excel 2010?
- gamegoblin 3y agoIt varies depending on what you are doing, but is probably 100x faster on average. Some things are literally 10000x faster because we are internally using algorithms with better asymptotic complexity than Excel, but there are a few edge cases where we are maybe only 10x faster (but we are always working to improve that — half my job is just analyzing flame graphs and grinding out perf improvements)
- breckognize 3y agoWhen 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!
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThanks, what are the lower bound numbers you're willing to guarantee in writing? (assuming identical systems) I think putting that on the site would save business customers a lot of evaluation time.
- codegeek 3y ago"We're the team that wrote the file system that powers S3." Your funding slide heading right here.
- Kluggy 3y agoHe was at AWS for 5 years from 2015 to 2020. It seems unlikely that he wrote the filesystem that powers s3. Improved, absolutely. His partner was a manager, not an engineer, per https://www.geekwire.com/2024/former-aws-engineers-raise-3m-to-take-on-tech-giants-with-worlds-fastest-spreadsheet/ https://www.geekwire.com/2024/former-aws-engineers-raise-3m-... Personally I don’t like this sort of puffery in funding slides nor announcements.
- gamegoblin 3y agoAll our backend engineers were on the S3 filesystem team. I'm Grant Slatton, founding engineer at Row Zero, and before this I designed and led the team that built S3's new filesystem, ShardStore (check out this paper https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bornholt/papers/shardstore-sosp21.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bornholt/papers/shardstore-sosp21...). Our other Row Zero backend engineers (Breck, Erich, Greg) were all on the team. Our frontend guy is ex-Airtable.
- QuinnyPig 3y agoOooh! Your reputation precedes you. Please, please, please put an “about us” page on your site. People get leery when there aren’t named humans identified as being behind a product that’s asking for production data access.
- codegeek 3y agoVCs invest in people and not products/ideas from what I have heard/read. I think it is imp. to mention that you were on the S3 team if you are building something like this. Huge credibility factor.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI wont be surprised if someone acquires them. This looks really well engineered and it gets shit done as they say.
- david_draco 3y agoHow does it compare to gnumeric in terms of speed?
- gamegoblin 3y agoWe haven't benchmarked against gnumeric, but will make a perf blog post in the next week or two (will post on HN too) and will see if we can add it to the comparison mix
- vcool07 3y agoHow is this different from Power BI ? Or is this software on similar lines as Power BI ?
- breckognize 3y agoWe'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.
- ant6n 3y agoDo you sell a software or a service running in a browser? Is the computation happening on my computer or your cloud?
- gamegoblin 3y agoAll computation happens in the cloud. This is really nice because we can scale up and down to fit your data size. If you need a supercomputer for 30 minutes, we can get you one.
- ethanwillis 3y agoWhat happens if your service is acquired and shut down? Is there any local fallback?
- lacoolj 3y agoHow does this compare to sheetsjs?
- chadash 3y agoWhat I'd love to see is an easy workflow to make this supplant Google docs. Right now, let's say i want a shared spreadsheet. I need to: 1) Signup for an account 2) Create a workbook 3) Click share and put in friend's email 4) They get an invite 5) Now they need to sign up 6) They can edit my doc I'm not a paying customer (or even a user... I just heard of this), so take this with a grain of salt, but what I'd love to see is a super-friction-less way for me to share a doc and make it editable without others needing accounts. Cut out as many steps as possible above. Doing this can be a great tool for marketing... what's better marketing than easily collaborating on a spreadsheet on a site that my friend is already using and that already looks very similar to tools I'm familiar with?
- warkdarrior 3y agoThis feature would be the fastest way for the company to have the least number of paying users. As a user, I'd pay for one account and then share new spreadsheets with anyone who asks for one on the Internet.
- SahAssar 3y agoThere are other billing models than per user if that's your concern.
- chadash 3y agoIf I’m the type of user who would ever consider paying, I’m most definitely not the type of person who wants to ask a stranger on the internet to setup a new spreadsheet for me every time I want to use one. I wouldn’t even want to ask a friend or coworker.
- fragmede 3y agoFortunately the Internet is real big, so there's definitely going to be a discord or subreddit or private slack where one person has a paid account and just makes new sheets for other people. it doesn't really scale though and it's cheap enough that most people will just make their own instead of being reliant on someone. broke teenagers isn't a market you have to fully satisfy.
- Terretta 3y agoStarting from a place of "I want to start providing this to my employees yesterday"... I can't see how to adopt this at an info-sec minded financial services firm that would otherwise love to pay you for it. For example, the docs show the product wants static creds for a Postgres database or signed URL for S3 bucket instead of leveraging best-practice service-to-service identity and access management. Maybe you support what I want, and I didn't find it at first glance. This either ... (a) needs to support modern dynamic or token-based authentication (e.g. Oauth2.0 client credentials grant, JWT, or for enterprises ideally CSP native IAM in Azure/GCP/AWS such as share S3 by cross account bucket permissions policy instead of signed URL, etc.), or ... (b) allow firms to operate this themselves so the spreadsheet is run in the firm's security context, no creds are shared and data never leaves. As you are running in AWS, providing this to run in AWS IAM context could solve it, but it's likely worth your time collaborating closely with FS firms that have solved cloud-native infosec at scale for the world's most demanding regulatory environments such as GSIFIs/GSIBs, since if you can do that, it's secure for anyone. Similar for HIPAA or FedRAMP. If your customers can be fully best practice compliant within these regulatory regimes without having to lower their standards or get exceptions to use you, then it's above the bar for pretty much everyone. // Full disclosure: Although using all 3 of AWS, Azure, and GCP, I was an AWS CAB member for half a decade (as principal engineers you likely know what this means), with a native-AWS preference.
- fakedang 3y agoHonestly, is it possible to decouple AWS from the app? >I can't see how to adopt this at an info-sec minded financial services firm that would otherwise love to pay you for it. Else this applies for us too.
- breckognize 3y agoFor 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.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoCan you make it a desktop application?
- breckognize 3y agoWe 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?
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago1. A new format would probably be okay, but make the icon for the application green so it looks like an excel file. It can open excel files right? 2. A lot of our sheets use VB/macros so a scripting language is pretty useful. Not sure about the other stuff. 3. No idea, around the price for an office 365 seat?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 3y agoXLSX is an open format, why invent another? xkcd 927 python in the app needs to be wholly self contained so whatever the backend it uses, it's separate from anything else on the system. charge through the nose for desktop clients because of how much it costs in development and support time. people who want native clients so it's not up on a cloud somewhere for whatever reason can pay for that privilege.
- gamegoblin 3y agoI implemented an Excel format processor and the Excel format does not lend itself well to super-high-performance for large datasets unfortunately
- fragmede 3y ago
- otoburb 3y agoThis looks like something that I could use right away, but I wonder, since we can write Python, does this mean that we can write back to one of the native backends (e.g. Postgres)? Currently, the only way to do this from Excel (e.g. saving a snapshot of an analyst's current dashboard that they just built) is through a macro, which then starts the (understandable) descent into Excel's External Content and Trust Center permissions hell.
- gamegoblin 3y agoYou can technically use the Python to write back to Postgres if you are comfortable putting your creds into the code window. The downside of this is your creds would be viewable to anyone you share the workbook with. We have gotten a lot of requests for write-back-to-DB (Snowflake, Postgres, etc) so will be adding first-class support for this feature soon that will use the same connection creds which are stored encrypted in KMS and are not viewable to people you share the workbook with. Would love to chat about your use-case if you want to reach out to us at contact[at]rowzero.io
- al_borland 3y agoIt’s worth noting that Excel supports Python now as well. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-python-in-excel-combining-the-power-of-python-and-the/ba-p/3893439 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...
- andelink 3y agoLooks like the Row Zero blog does a brief overview of existing Python spreadsheets, mentioning Excel support: https://rowzero.io/blog/top-python-spreadsheets#top-5-python-spreadsheets https://rowzero.io/blog/top-python-spreadsheets#top-5-python... Would like to see a more detailed comparison than the one they've got in their blog, though.
- LoganDark 3y agoYour spreadsheet experience was plugged by "no first-class Python support"? What makes Python special here?
- breckognize 3y agoNothing 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.
- nolongerthere 3y agoThe power of excel is that everyone has it and most people have a ton of familiarity with it and there’s a million results for anything you search Google that you don’t know how to do. Basically, all the network effects, bec you’re right if excel were a new product today it would lose to every single competitor that does it much better. Are you compatible with excel functions?
- breckognize 3y agoYes, Excel compatible: https://rowzero.io/docs/spreadsheet-functions 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).
- lancewiggs 3y agoYou'll also need formatting to be the same to get adoption. e.g. I wanted to format numbers as currency, and got USD$x,xxx as a result, and no obvious way to change that to $x,xxx.
- breckognize 3y agoSounds like a bug, but I'm having trouble reproducing. If you share repro steps with breck at rowzero.io, we'll get it fixed.
- lancewiggs 3y agoI’m in New Zealand if that helps. Generally (please) don’t assume location dictates formatting, while Excel’s assumptions are often incorrect and so custom formatting is a requirement.
- quickthrower2 3y agoYou can’t even assume location dictates location!
- benpacker 3y agoWhy build a custom arrow based columnar engine in Rust instead of using Datafusion or Polars?
- gamegoblin 3y agoDatafusion, Polars, and us are all based on Arrow. Datafusion is more targeting database users, Polars is targeting Python programmers/dataframe users, and we are targeting spreadsheet users. They are all ultimately just different UIs on top of Arrow. They're complimentary tools. We can take data out of the spreadsheet and put it into Polars instantly (you can do this in the Python code window if you want), etc. Regarding why not implement our spreadsheet built on top of those: spreadsheet allow for heterogenous types in columns, so that requires a lot of extra infrastructure to manage, whereas Datafusion and Polars require homogenous column types.
- tiffanyh 3y agoHi. Your product looks great. Would you mind helping me understand the differences between RowZero and something like Equals.com?
- breckognize 3y agoEquals 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.
- pax 3y agoExcited to see this. I built quite a few data-rich projects / dashboards with gSheets as backend/api - or as input UI, fetched to SQLite. I'd be looking very much forward for: data validation, conditional formatting (including heatmaps) and - what gSheet doesn't offer natively, multiple choices cells via data validation or values from another column/sheet. <s>I was surprised I couldn't way to view a spreadsheet as a DataTable, or back as a DataTable</s> (LE: found later how in documentation). And no sticky/frozen header row, ugh. Cherry on top would be gSheets like SQL flavoured QUERY. LE2: to add the wishlist, a potentially killer feature to/for some, dashboard type of sheet, with minimal/layout options –rows & columns blocks that can host charts & text (headings & paragraphs), with global filters – it would add a feature or two complementary to what gSheets offers. And at some point maybe, comments - per sheet or column only.
- gamegoblin 3y agoConditional formatting is high on the to-do list If you're open to it, email us at contact[at]rowzero.io and we would love to do a call to talk about your use case, what features you want, etc. We love doing customer calls and adding delightful features.