{"id":9676,"date":"2017-10-19T17:25:41","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T17:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/two-google-alums-just-raised-60m-to-rethink-documents.html"},"modified":"2017-10-19T17:25:41","modified_gmt":"2017-10-19T17:25:41","slug":"two-google-alums-just-raised-60m-to-rethink-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/two-google-alums-just-raised-60m-to-rethink-documents.html","title":{"rendered":"Two Google alums just raised $60M to rethink documents"},"content":{"rendered":"


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When you open a Google doc or a spreadsheet, you get a blank spreadsheet and some documentation as to what you can do with it \u2014 and that\u2019s pretty much where we\u2019ve been for quite some time.<\/p>\n

But two MIT graduates, coming in from Microsoft and Google, have built up a team that for the past three years has quietly been trying to rethink how we approach documents. CEO Shishir Mehrotra spent his life in documents, and now he and co-founder Alex DeNeui have raised $60 million for a startup called Coda<\/a> that\u2019s trying to start the concept of an online document or spreadsheet from scratch. Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst participated in the financing, with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and General Catalyst\u2019s Hemant Taneja joining the board of directors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe like to describe it as a new document that blends flexibility of documents, the power of spreadsheets, and the utility of applications into a single new canvas,\u201d Mehotra said. \u201cIt really started from an observation that we think that the world is full of all these different types of applications but most work gets done on documents and spreadsheets. Every team we looked at, you\u2019d ask them what they use to run things they\u2019d name off all these different applications. They have task trackers, CRM tools, inventory tools, but if you looked over their shoulders they\u2019d spend all day in documents and spreadsheets.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Starting with a blank slate, Coda aims to begin with the familiar look and feel of a document. From there, it kind of spins off in a different direction to allow a lot of flexible collaboration and UI elements and new ways to organize data that you might find across different platforms like spreadsheets or documents. Mehotra said the team built up a new kind of programming language for it as a refinement of the tools you\u2019d find in Google Sheets or Office 365. The hope is that Coda can be flexible enough to stitch together the problems that span all those kinds of products into a single flow \u2014 sheets, docs, and other kinds of places where people collaborate and store information.<\/p>\n

Part of the origin story can actually be traced back to one of his daughters looking over Mehotra\u2019s shoulder while he worked on a spreadsheet, Mehotra said. Explaining a spreadsheet to a 6-year-old, it turns out, is pretty difficult and he says he had to come up with a convoluted example to describe how to use it rather than starting from the primitives. Fast forward to launching Coda, he says they\u2019ve rethought it in such a way that his daughter can figure it out fast enough to start planning a competition on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you step back and think about it, I can\u2019t quite explain what [a spreadsheet] is, I have to find a contrived use case,\u201d Mehotra said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do with Coda is building a new set of primitives. Some we built to be intentionally familiar. We start with a frame that feels like a document, but the set of primitives are really built to be building blocks. They\u2019re reimagined in a way that we think it should be done in the first place.\u00a0If we started again, pretended we didn\u2019t know how those work, what would we come up with?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Taneja has known Mehrotra and DeNeui for some time since their days from college when he recalled that Mehrotra was already thinking about cloud infrastructure before cloud infrastructure was a thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you were to think first principles today as to what a modern surface, doing work should be, that\u2019s what they\u2019ve tried to conceive,\u201d Taneja said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very complicated engineering problem, Shashir [Mehotra] and Alex [DeNeui] have built one of the best engineering teams that can be built at the earliest stages.\u00a0[Mehotra\u2019s] trend is to make really complex problems and turn them into simple products.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the challenge might be getting people off their spreadsheets in the first place. But Mehotra said that Coda generally works side-by-side with them. The goal of Coda is to satisfy the use cases that span across multiple applications and to discover new kinds of use cases that would require something flexible like Coda.<\/p>\n

That kind of \u201cwe\u2019ll play nice\u201d argument probably works for now, but as more and more teams adopt it, we\u2019ll see if people start seeing it as a\u00a0complete replacement or if it\u2019ll be an \u201cover my dead body\u201d situation in terms of getting people to drop their spreadsheets. At the end of the day, it\u2019s normally the user base that figures out the killer use case for an app \u2014 which might be completely perpendicular from what the company originally anticipated.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are a lot of attempts at rethinking how we view online documents. Dropbox Paper is probably one of the biggest and more radical attempts at trying to figure out how to approach the whole \u201cblank slate on the internet.\u201d Mehotra argues that products out there still rely on the same \u201cmetaphors\u201d that led to the construction of the original document services. Time will tell whether or not Coda proves out to be as flexible, or more, to satisfy the needs for a wide array of teams that all have different demands.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/G0KtqeQhj1o\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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