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.

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!

The core idea: if you already know spreadsheets, you shouldn't need to learn Python/R or set up complex infrastructure to do serious quantitative analysis. One way to think of Quant is a low-cost Bloomberg Terminal alternative.

What's inside: Portfolio optimization (including Dalio's risk parity approach), Monte Carlo simulations for backtesting Sharpe ratio, Black-Scholes, and risk analysis Real-time data from 10,000+ sources via connectors. Direct execution to platforms like Robinhood AI assistants that can explain concepts and analyze your positions

The AI layer is particularly useful for learning - it can walk you through why certain strategies work, explain the math behind models, or help debug your analysis. We're offering a free tier to start, and we'd genuinely love feedback from folks here who've built their own trading systems or struggled with existing tools.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, data pipelines, or design decisions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45519169

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45201201

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

For now, one fun experience is loading the app on Mobile and just talking to your database. It's the same as talking from a desktop but can feel far more natural and the form factor let's you get quick business answers on the go.

The main things we bring to the table are that the AI can write code and handle much larger datasets than fit in ChatGPT, etc., and also that Superagents you can pipe your data in without code or SaaS interface kludge, so you can ask much more complicated questions than you usually might if you're not great at cleaning, filtering or analyzing data.

Today, we’re launching Superagents. You can now connect your spreadsheet to any database, API or MCP server on the Internet. All of that data is available inside your spreadsheet, and you can use AI to analyze it and build models, reports and visualizations.

The reason I started the company is because I spent 10 years at startups across engineering and operations roles and realized that Excel and Sheets weren't architected for the modern information environment. This creates a tremendous amount of nuisance and busywork cobbling together SaaS tools, reporting suites, and the misery of endless coordination meetings to make it all happen. (Boo meetings!)

Spreadsheets aren’t just a business application: they’re the original thinking tool. The quality of these tools has a downstream impact on analytical thinking and creativity writ large, so this is a problem worth solving. Fast forward to today, we’re a 6 person team taking on Excel, Sheets and ChatGPT, so we’re excited to hear what you think!

Who are Superagents for? Analysts, operators, and anyone doing data-centric work in spreadsheets. We see a tonne of finance people, of course, but also students, researchers and mom & pop shops. Sourcetable's superagents democratize data access and analysis, which is nice because our company’s mission is to make data accessible to everyone.

Why “Superagents”? Because they can plan and orchestrate other task-specific agents to complete your work for you. We have a lot of different AI tools and agents inside Sourcetable, but there’s a whole lot more on the Agentic Web. Superagents are like the conductor that coordinates them all and calls on them when needed. Also, it’s a fun feature name (thanks, Alyssa!)

If you remember the linked-data dream of the semantic web movement, that future is now: all of your business data is available and connected in Sourcetable.

How does it work? Sourcetable is running a python virtual machine under the hood. Everything is sandboxed, and there are hundreds of AI tools and libraries our AI can access. Superagents are also doing code-gen on the fly to solve problems. The closest system we have found is Replit’s sandboxed operating systems. Beyond that Mixtral, ChatGPT and Anthropic offer some limited data connectivity features, except these AI chat services lack the storage, compute, and code execution that Sourcetable and Replit provide. This is all very new.

How is this different to your previous data connectors, etc? We started out using ETL services to sync data and provide a GUI-driven PowerBI like experience in your spreadsheet. This was useful for people who knew SQL and how to write joins to combine fragmented data, but for everyone else (read: practically everyone), this solution just didn’t provide the frictionless, self-serve experience that we wanted.

Our choices were to switch the GTM motion or change the product, so we shelved that reporting suite and focused on our AI spreadsheet and waited for models to catch up with our ambitions. Now that they have, we’re re-launching Sourcetable with our original goal in mind: building a spreadsheet-based operating system for the Agent Web, with fully networked data access for everyone on your team.

AI is the great UX enabler.

Caveats:

* We heavily use Postgres, Google Analytics, Stripe and Google Search Console with Superagents.

* We haven’t tested every endpoint on the Internet. We find that mainstream, well documented applications work best.

* Yes, you can write data back to 3rd party applications and databases. We generally advise against this unless you understand the risks involved in giving AI write-access to your data.

Bonus round:

* All data connectors added during this launch week are FREE. (Regular AI messaging limits still apply.)

Product Feedback? eoin@sourcetable.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186904

Points: 35

# Comments: 13

From there, San Francisco looks quite small, but many neighborhoods are worlds away from the action - Outer Richmond is not the density of networks you are looking for, for example (better than rest of world, suboptimal for SF).

Co-locating close to the center of these dense founder networks is the best way maximize luck and opportunity.

This map isn't perfect, but it makes it pretty obvious where you should move if you're interested in startups.

Career wise, moving to "the center of the network" is still the best decision I ever made.

We're looking for one Product Marketer to join our team in a part-time contract capacity in the Bay Area (San Francisco preferred). The requirement are that you need to be great at video storytelling and also be strong at spreadsheets & analysis.

Everyone on our team codes, and you should too. There's no technical requirement for the role, per-se, but we have found it is better this way.

Email me if this sounds interesting.

Big props to Joseph Wilson (@pseudo-r) who maintains the unofficial ESPN API. https://github.com/pseudo-r/Public-ESPN-API. Reliably the best service for interacting with fantasy sports data and AI.

This was an interesting project to work on, mainly because the quality and popularity of API docs for various services really does impact the experience of untrained LLMs using them out of the box. It was fun to experience this outside of our regular B2B context, and my big takeaway from this project was just how much people are underestimating the importance of this as we experience the rise of the agentic web over the next 3 years. (Agents are users too!)

We included some easter egg cricket features, but we haven't found a free service the AI likes enough to bundle that in officially yet, so that'll come at a later date. (We're Aussies, so of course the fantasy Cricket analysis will improve over time : )

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44986977

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Agents are users now, and agent-friendly docs and libraries will be standard practice for the tools that want to thrive through broader industry adoption.

Similarly, perhaps you wouldn't care if your website wasn't easily parsable by crawlers, but if you'd like your work to appear in search results you might like to include a sitemap or structure the HTML a little.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44871811

Points: 1

# Comments: 0