Fivetran - Data analysis made easy. YC-Backed Fivetran Launches A Smart Online Spreadsheet For Data Analysis. Fivetran, a new Y Combinator-backed startup that is launching today, wants to bring spreadsheets into the modern age and make it easier for users to work with messy data and analyze large amounts of information. Most people, for better or worse, use their spreadsheets as databases, and Fivetran acknowledges this by combining SQL-like queries with standard spreadsheet functions and statistical tools that will look familiar to users of more advanced tools like Matlab.
As the co-founders George Fraser (CEO) and Taylor Brown (head of product) told me earlier this week, the idea behind the project is that “spreadsheets have 50 percent of the power of programming and we want to bring the other 50 percent to spreadsheets.” As the founders told me, there is still a huge gulf between tools like Excel and Matlab. The earliest prototypes of Fivetran still leaned more toward the Matlab side of things and looked more like a programming environment.
Big Data is Just Data, Why Excel “Sucks”, and 1,000 Miles of Data. ***UPDATE: Slides uploaded here. One of My Slides From Last Night – Equally Relevant to Excel, BI, DB, and Big Data Pros Had a great time last night at the NYC MSBIgData group. I’ve never spoken to a group quite like last night’s, but I struggle to explain how they were different. It’s easier to explain what they were not.
Even though the user group is a Big Data and BI user group, they were not a Hive/Hadoop crowd, which shouldn’t have surprised me – there aren’t enough Hive/Hadoop people in the world to really have crowds of them laying around, at least not yet. But there also wasn’t critical mass of seemingly any other discipline – not BI, not Excel, not DBA, not SharePoint, not programmer.
I think my best assessment is that they were simply a group of people who DO things. (If you were at last night’s talk, please replace every instance of the word “they” above with the word “you.” Big Data is Just Data, and Hadoop is Just a Way to Store Lots of It A Row of Data. 1,000 Miles of Data. Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheets. Sql - Data gathering and manipulation: is there something better than Excel.