Cross-Functional and Friendly and More

Happy Sunday!

The theme of the week at Every is disruption, with essays on threats to Excel’s monopoly, the future of writing with machines, and why venture capital is due for a shakeup. Plus, a look at an underappreciated “sixth sense”—and a new podcast! 

Let’s get to it!

The End of Excel? 

For decades, if you told someone you were building something to go toe-to-toe with Excel, the reaction you were likely to hear was “Good luck.” The received wisdom seemed to be that Microsoft had built something so bulletproof, so perfectly primed to the needs of the target audience, that its primacy could never be challenged.

Lately, though, it seems like spreadsheet products are everywhere. Notion. Coda. Airtable. The list goes on. So why now? And what is it about the spreadsheet paradigm that makes it so compelling in the first place? 

Read.

Writing with Machines

When people hear about AI-powered writing tools, their reactions tend to fall into one of two camps: either they think it’s amazing, and they want AI to do all of the writing for them forever, or they think it’s an abomination that promises to flood the world with subpar content.

As Nathan points out in this essay, both of these reactions miss the point, because both assume on some level that AI is going to replace writers wholesale—which is not what’s going to happen. What AI is going to do is far more subtle, and far more interesting.