Beyond Excel and Google Sheets: Innovations in Handling Massive Spreadsheets Amidst the Big Data Rev

Companies are generating an ocean full of data, with marketing teams swimming in customer insights and finance departments navigating through intricate transactions. And let’s not even talk about how enormous spreadsheet files generated by cybersecurity teams are.

Unfortunately, spreadsheet platforms like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets can’t handle big data spreadsheet files with millions or billions of rows. As of this writing, the maximum row limit of Excel is 1,048,576. Whereas, Google Sheets has a maximum cell limit of 10 million.

One of the best ways to smartly analyze big data spreadsheets without causing your browser to crash or your computer to run out of memory is using Gigasheet.

Recently, I interviewed Jason Hines, the Co-founder of Gigasheet, a big data spreadsheet platform that allows its users to upload and analyze gigantic-sized spreadsheets packed with millions or billions or rows.

What is your company in 2–5 words?

The big data spreadsheet.

Why is now the time for your company to exist?

Spreadsheet platforms like Excel, Airtable, Smartsheet, and Google Sheets are not built for handling big data. These tools are incredibly powerful and offer tons of useful capabilities, but because of the limited capabilities that restrict users from working with huge datasets. That’s where Gigasheet is a game-changer.

We have built this platform for users looking for something more powerful than Excel and Google Sheets.

We want users to get insights from big data without having to write code or set up databases. You shouldn’t need a dedicated Data Science team or a Computer Science degree to get answers from really big datasets. And that’s what our sole focus is.

Since spreadsheets are second-nature to most professionals, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel with a new product with the same functionality as a sheet. Instead, we decided to simplify spreadsheets for huge datasets.

With Gigasheet, we offer data science capabilities in a lite platform with features like data enrichment, grouping, filtering, and much more.

In a line, we combine the power of big data with the convenience of spreadsheets to work seamlessly with large datasets.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I worked with cybersecurity analysts and revenue teams for a long time in my career. I realized that the volume of the data they handled was so large and complicated that they had to go through too much hassle to export and import it into a database.

Besides, not everyone had database skills. So, they had to wait for other teams to support them in the research process, creating lengthy dependencies.

That was the core problem statement we wanted to solve. My first-hand experience of working with these analysts and observing their problems in real-time helped me build Gigasheet as a powerful solution for working with large datasets, minus the hassle.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Wow, that’s a good question. To be honest, since I committed to building Gigasheet, I haven’t even considered doing anything else. If I wasn’t doing this, I guess I’d probably be building another company or helping someone else do it.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

I believe the goal of a venture-backed startup like ours is to fund our growth. So, we’re measuring success based on the platform’s utility for our end-users and our ability to go forward with our product roadmap as planned.

In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

We offer a big data spreadsheet platform with several use cases and advanced capabilities. We serve users from multiple industries and roles, including eCommerce, cybersecurity, marketing, sales, analysts, and more.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Just the sheer number of users and data we’re processing is kind of mindblowing. We recently processed our 5 trillionth data point and have more than 30,000 users on Gigasheet today. It’s wild to think about it, but we’re processing, on average, about 200,000 cells of data every second.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

We've recently launched APIs to help users connect other systems to Gigasheet. This makes Gigasheet a powerful solution for enterprises, particularly heavy-duty applications like Snowflake or Salesforce.

You can automate everything possible on the platform. So, whether you want to upload your data on a simpler interface, schedule import/export, or clean and inspect it, it's all possible with our enterprise API.

We're also launching shared workspaces for teams. Multiple users from the same company use Gigasheet for collaboration on big files. That motivated us to expand beyond the single-user interface and add the shared workspace functionality to help teams work together seamlessly.

Another cool thing on our radar is introducing more enrichments with our predefined partners. So, users can enrich massive data at scale without any coding skills.

Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

Our first paying customer was an accountant in Canada. We never spoke to them, but it seems like they were successful. Each month we’ve been adding more customers, which is great, but our primary focus remains on building out more features in our product for 2023.

What’s your biggest threat?

As a startup, there are always 1,000 ways to die. The biggest threats are probably existential factors that are outside of our control - stability of financial markets and things like economic factors. As Paul Graham has said, “Startups rarely die in mid keystroke.” So, we keep building.