Just wanted to say a big thank you to the HN community —
Everything started with this post from over 5 years ago [1] which gave me and Lukas (CTO) enough conviction to quit our jobs to work on Causal full-time.
A few months later we launched an Excel sensitivity tool [2]. In 2022 we shared how we scaled our calculation engine to billions of cells [3] and a few months ago we had a successful Show HN of Causal 2.0 [4]
The product is now used by 100s of startups (many YC companies) and we're excited for this next phase of growth within Lucanet :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704418
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625974
I was building something similar back during COVID, as LTSE's Runway stopped being improve, Summit (usesummit.com) pivoted to being a no-code tool and Obvious (YC S21 perhaps?) shut down.
Instead of building it myself, I found and have been using Causal actively since April 2021 and advocating for it ever since, using it heavily for my latest three ventures and just last month for personal use. It's so far one of my favorite products to use, on level with Linear in terms of quality!
I'm not a commercial user and might never be, but it has been invaluable for me in my commercial and personal uses for budgeting and forecasting.
Hope you can fit in great at Lucanet, and try your best to keep the free model available!
Nothing will change for existing users so you can keep using it for sure :)
A related question, if you don't mind me asking: was acquisition your initial goal when you founded Causal, or did you just receive an offer you couldn't refuse?
We didn’t have an end goal in mind from the beginning — we had the idea for the product and wanted to see if it had legs as a business, and then grow it and see where we could take it.
From what I recall, I don’t think this kind of acquisition was on our radar in the early days — we expected the startup game to be much more binary (massive outcome or bust), and this was the standard narrative at the time.
We’re fortunate to have landed in a middle ground that more founders should be aware of earlier on (and I think awareness is increasing).
Not a massive outcome by VC standards, but still a win for us, our team, our customers, our product, and our early investors, and not the end of the journey yet!
You mean the area 97% of businesses who don't go bust operate? I think most business owners are well aware of it. For some reason though, startup founders live in a different reality.
1. small by vc standard
2. still life changing for founders & employees
97% of businesses are things like "open up another pizza place in the corner", "franchise a McDonald's", "open up a town hardware shop", etc. That's what being an entrepreneur means for much of the world.
Startups, at least the kind that are usually built in tech, and which VCs usually fund, are an entirely different thing. They are pursuing innovation, trying to build a new product that didn't exist before into a real business. The majority of failures are various forms of product-market fit failures - the product either doesn't fill a real need, or else can't be made into a viable business.
You can totally build the first kind of business, even in tech. (I should know, I've done it twice.) But it's important to remember that it is different, and not confuse the two.
I haven’t checked out Tanstack table much but given that it’s such a core component of the product I would like to build our own eventually. Doing that when you start out is probably not worth it though.
I would recommend AG-Grid for most data apps until a well supported alternative comes out. My understanding is that Tanstack Table is aimed at generic apps that happen to have a table. Perspective's [2] table component is most likely more capable than AG-Grids, but it needs significantly more documentation and examples.
AG-Grid has a particular way of building things that seems to map to well to pulling data from a database or basic webservice. AG-Grid works very well for this use case. The AG-Grid enterprise features are built around this type of data model too.
If your data is small enough to fit into memory (less than 50 MB), it works very well. AG-Grid doesn't have a connector to arrow or parquet (I will eventually write my own). For larger datasets JSON generation and parsing performance bottlenecks. Additionally Parquet/Arrow offers much better types.
Configuring AG-Grid is tricky, especially when you want config to be declarative. If you want to define your own custom rendering components, getting them to work properly per column when you want different renderers for pinned rows is tricky (my solution [3])
Support for the community version of AG-Grid is practically non-existent. I understand that they have an enterprise business model that charges for support. They don't seem to be interested in answering community bug reports or comments, even for generically relevant bugs.
I have a decent amount of trust in AG-Grid's community offering [4], I don't see them cannibalizing community features to put them in their enterprise offering. Their enterprise features are the main development focus of the team, particularly the charts. The charts offering isn't impressive compared to bokeh, plotly, or vega. It would work for line of business apps, but not for a userbase familiar with better analytic platforms.
All that said. AG-Grid has excellent documentation and examples. They examples are swappable between Javascript, Typescript, React, and Angular.
[1] https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo
[2] https://github.com/finos/perspective
[3] live example https://buckaroo-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/#/DF...
[4] https://blog.ag-grid.com/javascript-jabber-podcast/
Do you think the US flip made a meaningful difference (presuming you did it for US customer/investor access)? Lucanet is EU, so maybe it complicated it in the end
Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755858 - March 2024 (71 comments)
Scaling our spreadsheet engine from thousands to billions of cells - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000400 - July 2022 (109 comments)
Show HN: Excel Sensitivity Analysis Tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625974 - Nov 2019 (30 comments)
Show HN: Should you buy a house and rent it out? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704418 - April 2019 (243 comments)
I think the spreadsheet space is honestly super challenging. There’s lots of possible use-cases for these tools, but also, Excel/Sheets are great products that everyone already knows how to use.
I think if these products nail some core use-case(s) that are valuable enough to build the core business around, then this can probably get you to “escape velocity” and you can start to become a truly horizontal tool as traction and awareness compound. (This is the path we were going for)
Lots of spreadsheet type products have tried to stay very horizontal from the beginning and end up trying to boil the ocean, or ended up focusing on a dead-end use-case that isn’t valuable enough to reach that escape velocity.
are you implying your path will be changing in any way post acquisition? the announcement didnt make it seem like that (but ofc we all know things often change post acquisition)
These damn math folks are out here trying to make everything multi- dimensional
Rendering grids/tables/charts in the browser is also quite tricky if you want it to be fast!
Separately, I think the answer was clear to most people - they did better than other well-paying alternatives (meaning it wasn't a poor outcome / waste of effort from individual perspective), but they're not going to share the specifics.
It is fair to ask if they got a good money for it or just a nice job
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Uhm disagree, I know what I was posting (doesn't seem it was against the rules either), I was trying to understand better the answer that OP had submitted as a reply to my first question.
It definitely helped me put it into a better perspective (i.e. no clue what an average salary at a large company looks like). That being said the answer to my question from the author still lacks enough details to make "total sense" in my mind - even after passing it through GPT.
I didn't say you didn't know what you were posting, I said you couldn't assess it which is a conclusion I reached by reading your comment which ends: "Not sure if that helps or if it's accurate". But like the mod comments say, HN is for conversation between people rather than a conversation between you and an LLM.
Acquihired or IP sell( with enough money for retirement I hope) ?
I think if I ever hit a real payday I'm done working.