Rows Success Story. 10 OOTB questions to founder Humberto Ayres Pereira

Rows.com is like Deadpool. Spreadsheets never really die — like the character. There's also a kind of shared humor component, Deadpool who stands against everyone else, and spreadsheets that are the most successful ugly duckling of the software world. Finally, to build a spreadsheet platform, you really need to adhere to Deadpool's motto: "Maximum effort!". (Check second 50 of this video).

Reading lots of books on Ads and the history of Marketing has made us obsess about our brand and communications. That's how we ended up rebranding to Rows.com, or doing a Billboard in front of Microsoft's and Google's office.

For a completely different industry, I would pick robots. I think an automation revolution is going to happen in the next 20 years. Batteries capacity is growing while cost is shrining to zero, and a lot of investment is coming that way. There's also AI exploding. We need a few improvements into actuators (the limbs and muscles) and we have robots!

Spreadsheets will be a winner in the software race.

Non-engineers need a software to manipulate and visualize data.

When humans colonize Mars, we won't take 200 frontend and 50 backend engineers with them.. we will take spreadsheets.

Mostly, we do Hackathons. Hackathons are permission-less innovation. That's how we shipping our successful AI Analyst feature.

If I could, I would try to spend it next to the computation teams that work on Excel. They have been improving their computation engine for 30 years, and we could learn so many shortcuts to things we have to rediscover everyday.

To be honest, the most memorable feedback was when a friend of mine who is a big Microsoft Excel user, and who actually earns a living as a spreadsheet consultant, used Rows in a relevant project in the US.

He was pretty happy about the product, figured it out himself, and just shot me a WhatsApp message "I get Rows now".

They're a paid customer now!

We have gotten many pieces of the software wrong. We built too much automation, too little data exploration UX, etc.

That forced our company into fast iteration mode, revising everything, from product to process to team.

As a result, we are now much more agile and stronger as a team. Also less BS.

Focus on the UX of Data first, worry about automations and computations later.

Having Data is only a step, making sure the experience of search, connecting, requesting, preparing and rendering data, and then automating it, is a LOT of work.

The Disney movie Ratatouille.

There is this speech by a character, Anton Ego:

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends."

This pretty much sums up how we should approach criticism and stoicism. Things are hard, but that's why we do them.