mceoin

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
741
Submissions
363
Member since
Feb 17
Founder @ Sourcetable.com

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.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Congrats on the launch Dave! I was wondering who was going to launch an attempt at industry standard here. Hope it gains widespread adoption.
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Coda got acquired by Grammarly who then installed Shishir Mehrotra (Coda CEO) as CEO of Grammarly. They then acquired Superhuman Mail and renamed the whole thing Superhuman. They also acquired Rows to bring a formal spreadsheet into the mix to add to their Coda tables and productivity suite. (Well played.)

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.

Comment · 4 months ago
Google owns 14% of Anthropic.
Comment · 6 months ago
More a practice than a project, but I'm working on using voice as much as possible to interact with computers. This started with mapping the Tap Assistance on my phone to ChatGPT voice, then vibe coding better voice transcription for my computer, then shifting increasing amounts of work to Claude Remote control, etc.

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.

Comment · 7 months ago
For the non-coders here, you can query and analyze all of play.clickhouse.com in Sourcetable's chat interface. You can also ask it for the code produced so you can copy/paste that back into the Clickhouse interface.
Comment · 1 year ago
We'll hit a new plateau somewhere, for sure. Still, I'm glad I'm not doing my spreadsheets on paper so net win so far!
Comment · 1 year ago
I second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15% of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.

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!

Comment · 1 year ago
How is this different from Zapier?
Comment · 1 year ago
is this just for design or can I order the parts too?
Comment · 1 year ago
Would love to hear how it goes!
Comment · 1 year ago

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