The following interview is a conversation we had with Hjalmar Gislason, CEO and Founder of Grid, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $16.5 Million Raised to Build the Spreadsheet of the Future

Hjalmar Gislason
Thanks for having me. 

Brett
And can you go ahead and say your last name for us? I was looking at it. It looked pretty daunting. I know you’re based in Iceland there, and those are always tricky names. So how do you say your last name? 

Hjalmar Gislason
This is usually the most difficult part of any presentation or interview I do. So it’s Gistlazon. 

Brett
Okay, there we go. Now it’s officially on the record. 

Hjalmar Gislason
What’s going on in Iceland today? 

Brett
Tell us about Iceland. For those who haven’t been. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah, well, it’s a pretty unique place, I guess. So it will probably surprise quite a lot of people that we have a fairly active tax scene here, fairly active startup scene, at least given how small the population is. And it’s a very kind of modern western society. Safe, nice, actually even have nice weather today, which is not always the case. 

Brett
Amazing. Now, can you tell our audience just a bit more about your background, and the work you were doing before you founded grid? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, born and bred in Iceland. That’s where my funny name and funny accent comes from. I actually grew up in the countryside, so I spent a lot of time on my grandparents’ farm. My parents were both associated with agricultural university, so kind of grew up in a small town around that university. So I often use as an icebreaker the fact that the town actually is so close to the arctic circle that we don’t see the sun for six weeks. Again, you know, something that surprises a lot of people, but when anything you grow up with is normal to you as a kid, pretty easy going childhood, and then kind of, I guess you could say I’ve been starting companies more or less my whole life. 

Hjalmar Gislason
So since I was about 20, I dropped out of university to start the company with a few friends, and since then I’ve started. So grid is my fifth company as a Founder. They’ve all been software companies, but they’ve ranged from gaming, because that’s what you’re interested in when you’re 20, at least for me. And then through mobile services, search, and then my last startup and the current one are very much kind of focused on data and visualization calculations and the like. And we’ll kind of dig into that a little bit more, I guess. 

Brett
When it comes to your inspiration as a Founder and as an entrepreneur, where does that inspiration come from? And are there any specific entrepreneurs and founders that have really inspired you along the way? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah. So, on the one hand, I come from a long line of people that have run their own businesses in one way or another, kind of, whether that’s the farm that both of my grandparents were running, like the two different farms that my grandparents were running, or the shop that my great grandfather set up. My dad founded a couple of companies also when he was young. So it’s always been around me kind of entrepreneurship in one way or another, even though essentially before the age of software. So I didn’t have anyone around me that had like, a nine to five job. So nobody told me that was what I was supposed to do, and that’s how I got into entrepreneurship. 

Hjalmar Gislason
It was essentially just the normal thing to do for the people I looked up to when it comes to inspirations, I guess there were a couple of people here in Iceland that were trailblazers when it came to staffing technology companies here, and it was great to have some role models there. The role model that I go back to, and this is going to be an unusual one, the role model that has probably most affected what I do today is a guy called Hans Rustling. He’s the Founder of an organization called Gapminder. Hans sadly passed away a few years ago, but there was a TED presentation or lecture that he did that went pretty viral in 2007 or eight when it came out, called the best stats you’ve ever seen. So Hans was a doctor, been doing a lot of work in developing countries. 

Hjalmar Gislason
He basically kind of, through data and lively storytelling, started breaking down a lot of the pre consumptions we have about that part of the world. And it was such an entertaining lecture that he gave, but at the same time, kind of presenting facts in that lively manner that I kind of wanted to see if we can do more of that kind of blending together good storytelling and then kind of the hard facts that go into kind of the logical side of the brain. So I think I can say that Hans Rustling is the biggest influence I’ve had on me as kind of a Founder and on my career where it stands today. 

Brett
What about books and the way we like to frame this? This comes from an author called or named Ryan Holiday. He calls them quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core. It really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind for you? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah. So there are three books that come to mind, actually. One is written by Hans Rosling himself, called factfulness. That’s a really good book that I recommend and kind know goes in line with what I mentioned about him before. But the other two books that come to mind, that when I read them, they kind of changed the way I see the world, are, first of all, a short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson, a really kind of wide ranging book that essentially tells you about many of humanity’s biggest discoveries, but through stories of the people that discovered them. So you learn a lot about history, technology, science, and so on, but through the stories of the people that were involved in making those discoveries. 

Hjalmar Gislason
And the third book that comes to mind is sapiens, by you, will, Noah Harari, that a lot of people obviously know and have read. And that was another book that kind of gave me a new way of thinking about and framing and talking about a lot of the things that you kind of knew. But you know how it is when you finally get a framework to talk about things and think about things, it changes the way you do talk and think about them. 

Brett
I’ve not heard of the first two books, but just added those to Amazon. Cart and Sapiens is also one of my favorites. It’s a very dense book, though. I found myself having to put it down every ten or 20 pages just to try to digest what they were saying, because it’s very deep and it’s very heavy content, in my opinion. 

Hjalmar Gislason
I totally agree. And I read much more nonfiction than fiction. And for the longest time, I kind of did that because I thought in some ways it was a waste of time to read fiction. But now I do more and more of that because that also sometimes gives you new perspectives and new ways of thinking about things. And also, like you say, when you’re reading something abstract, you tend to read slowly. You tend to have to think about things, maybe reread some of the passages, whereas when you read a good novel, it just flows, to me at least, like a movie. So it’s a much more enjoyable experience. 

Brett
Yeah, I find with novels, too, I’m able to disconnect a bit more and almost put myself in a meditative state where I’m really disconnected, really not thinking about anything else. It’s kind of a full immersion into reading the book, and that’s always, I think, a good place to get into. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Exactly. 

Brett
Let’s switch gears now and let’s talk about the company. So you’re going up against spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were invented, what, 40 years ago, and they haven’t evolved since. So I’ll tee it up for you to start off from there. Why haven’t spreadsheets evolved at all? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Well, they have evolved a little bit, but they just haven’t necessarily taken the same leaps that many other categories of software have. It’s actually interesting. So the father of the spreadsheet, the kind of original creator of visical, the very first spreadsheet, the way we kind of know them today, he’s an advisor to us and has become a friend over time. He was pretty young when he released visical back in 79 and is still kind of very much on top of it when it comes to technology. So there’s probably no other software like, people don’t realize how much the spreadsheet changed the world, because what happened there is essentially visical. Before the spreadsheet, there was no reason anybody would have a computer on their desk at work. 

Hjalmar Gislason
The first reason anybody would buy a personal computer and put it on their desk was to run Visicalc. And that’s kind of a pretty fundamental shift. Steve Jobs made several references to this, that if Visicalk hadn’t been written for Apple two would probably never have made it kind of into the business world. And it’s not only kind of bringing the pc into the workplace, but it’s also the spreadsheets are, as we know, very versatile, which is both their biggest con and the biggest pro for them. So they allow you to do a lot of different things, and in some ways, you can draw lineage of pretty much any category of business software back to a spreadsheet. There were no crms back in the day, the first inklings of a CRM system that most people would see would be a spreadsheet. 

Hjalmar Gislason
There were no ERP systems. There were no kind of these categories that didn’t exist. But they all started out in spreadsheets. And for many companies, they actually still start out in spreadsheets before they buy purpose built software for these different categories. When you’re just kind of a mom and pop shop, a lot of these needs are solved in a spreadsheet. And that is again, kind of one of the unique characteristics of a spreadsheet is that they are versatile enough that they allow kind of an everyday person to take a care of lot of their custom it needs, because they can simply just type data into cells, do maybe some simple calculations, keep track of things and so on in a spreadsheet without needing a much more sophisticated solution for that. 

Hjalmar Gislason
So when I started looking into this space, then it dawned on me that we take spreadsheet very much for granted. They’re a little bit like oxygen, we use it every day, but we wouldn’t mention it as something that we kind of consumed that day. And the same with the spreadsheet. It’s used for all sorts of things, but very few people had given it a second. You know, Excel has been dominant in that market for a very long time, and then Google Sheets has come along and made a little dent in the market, but still very much kind of the small player there. Now, the way we framed it earlier is that we’re a next generation spreadsheet platform. That is true. But what we also do is that we want to meet people where they are. 

Hjalmar Gislason
We know people are doing a lot of work in Excel and Google sheets, and very much kind of helping the users of these software platforms to use the workbooks that they’ve already created and the knowledge they already have of these spreadsheets to do things differently. So maybe that’s kind of a good lead into what it is actually that we do. We like to say that because of all these things I mentioned before, in many ways spreadsheets run the world and we then run spreadsheets. And what that means is that we have built a spreadsheet engine that can run spreadsheets that are made in other spreadsheet software. You can also build a spreadsheet from scratch inside of grid, but that’s not kind of our primary thing. What we do is we then help people turn these spreadsheets into tools for the web. 

Hjalmar Gislason
So whether that’s kind of simple tools like calculators, think of a mortgage calculator, return on investor calculator pricing, calculator that you might even publish on your public website. We help people transform the spreadsheets that they’ve already made into those types of tools, then do kind of lead capture on top of that, and even build what kind of fairly be called simple applications, just using your spreadsheet skills, but then using grid to be able to publish those, give them kind of a nice UI and distribute them securely to your audience. 

Brett
What’s the ICP look like? Who are you seeing the most traction with right now? Or who is that ideal customer that you want to be selling today? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Essentially, we could call them the spreadsheet nerd. I think most of them will actually self identify as such, but maybe kind of put more broadly, a spreadsheet modeler that realizes that they need to distribute what they have built in the spreadsheet to others, whether that’s kind of for reporting purposes or helping with decision making inside of your organization or to a broader audience. So spreadsheet modelers, broadly speaking. But then they obviously, just because of where spreadsheets play the biggest role, we tend to see quite a lot of people in finance and energy as kind of sectors, and then within the organization, these are typically kind of the finance people, the operators, but also kind of sales and marketing people. 

Hjalmar Gislason
And in smaller organization, we like to talk about kind of the multitasking manager, because in a smaller organization, again, spreadsheets will typically play a pretty big role, and that’s where your data tends to come together from all the different angles, and that’s where your decision making tends to be happening. So to sum it up, ICP spreadsheet nerds in small to medium sized companies that are using spreadsheets to communicate with others. 

Brett
When I think through some of my conversations with friends who work industries like, say, finance, it seems like they were very much brought up on spreadsheets. They brag about what they’re able to do on spreadsheets, and that’s kind of where they live, is in spreadsheets. So is it hard to pull those people away and get them to try something new because they’ve spent their entire career kind of using the status quo. Is that hard to get them to change? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yes, for sure. I mean, there are people that don’t see any reason to ever step outside of excel for anything, and that goes for their entire lives. They plan everything, do everything, track everything inside of something like Excel. But the people that fall in love with grid are people that realize that they have a lot of spreadsheet skills, but they can now use these spreadsheet skills to do things that before grid just weren’t possible. They essentially become at least a front end and in some cases, kind of full stack programmers for the web by using their existing spreadsheet skills, bringing those spreadsheets into grid, then using grid to build the Uis and build the logic and kind of host things securely and distribute them. 

Hjalmar Gislason
So those are kind of the people that tend to fall in love but there are a lot of people that would rather just keep emailing around an excel file and don’t see why that might even be a problem. 

Brett
Have you seen the woman from TikTok who’s gone viral and built this big business off of marketing how to use Excel? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah, absolutely. It’s fascinating. And that actually goes to show also that I think probably people have been predicting the end of spreadsheets for a very long time. I know of companies that have kind of set out an event to get rid of spreadsheets entirely from their businesses. I don’t know of anyone that’s been successful at that. And while, as I touched upon before, we’ve seen a lot of purpose built software built to kind of take over use cases that previously were often solved with spreadsheets, the long tail of tasks that people need to take care of in business and in their daily lives just keeps getting longer. So there are always new needs where the purpose built tools simply don’t meet them, don’t have the flexibility, or you don’t want to buy yet another piece of software. 

Hjalmar Gislason
You just want to add a few columns to your spreadsheet and kind of track whatever the new thing is that you want to track. So spreadsheets aren’t going anywhere. And kind of where that train of thought came from is that young people are also learning how to use spreadsheets, and they’re doing it differently. Right now, we kind of see quite a lot of AI being used to generate formulas. That’s something we built into our own spreadsheet editor that you can, instead of, if you don’t know what the functions are called and kind of how to use them, you can describe the formula that you’re trying to build in a natural language, and grid comes back with a suggested formula for you. And this works phenomenally well. I find myself using it all the time as well. 

Hjalmar Gislason
But for people that are new to spreadsheets, this is something that helps them. It takes away all the googling and just allows you to work more naturally inside of the product. 

Brett
From my conversations with about 500 different founders now, what I’ve learned from them is that they can kind of trace back a series of specific, very pivotal turning points in the business that really changed the trajectory of everything that was happening. Do any points like that come to mind for you? Were there any specific points that you can reflect on and say, yes, that was a critical turning point for the company? And if so, what was that turning point and how did it happen? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah, actually there are probably two and they sent us back and forth between kind of two, well, I wouldn’t say polar opposite, but two kind of different positionings that we have been playing with. We started out very much as a tool for spreadsheet modelers, and that’s where we found quite a lot of early user love. And a lot of them, most of them, and almost all of our paying customers were using grid to build out calculators. So that felt pretty nice. But then kind of as we started projecting and kind of thinking about how big really is the market for just turning spreadsheets into calculators. And while the market is bigger than many might think, that’s not a billion dollar company. So the pivotal point number one was essentially, it seems like we’re getting into a local maxima here. 

Hjalmar Gislason
What else is happening in the world that we can apply the product we’ve built, the technology we’ve built to, and latch onto a larger wave that’s happening. And that led us to kind of look at things that were happening with products like notion and airtable and canva and other tools that had kind of taken on different categories of productivity tools and really come up with a next generation solution to those needs. In many ways, I’m simplifying a lot here, but in many ways, notion is for that generation what word and Google Docs were before canva has taken over the graphical side of things. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Airtable is kind of in the category where I guess you could say in some ways, if you’re old enough and you remember Lotus nodes or Microsoft access, these types of use cases are now kind of the next gen, is doing these types of things in airtable, but nobody had really done kind of a next gen tool for working with numbers. 

Hjalmar Gislason
So this was kind of a wave that we decided to focus on, put a lot of effort into lowering the barrier to entry to our product, making the usability kind of really nice, making the onboarding really nice, and kind of doing all the things that those types of tools are typically very good at, or success factors for these types of tools, and found a decent product market fit, at least let’s call it a kind of user fit with those users as they were looking to make simple charts for the notion setups or visualize their airtable data, visualize their notion data and so on. 

Hjalmar Gislason
But what we realized after kind of going after that market for a little while, and here comes the other pivotal point, is were much more unaive to have for most of these people than were a must have because they were using grid for fairly simple things, even just static charts out of, let’s say static charts out of the notion database or something like that. And yes, that’s nice. There are other ways to do it. None of them are quite as smooth as using grid for it, but they were not terribly incentivized to kind of upgrade and pay for it. And that’s kind of we saw through experience. While on the other hand, while the target audience, or at least on the top of funnel kind of the user acquisition side, we got a lot fewer of those kind of spreadsheet modelers. 

Hjalmar Gislason
And the spreadsheet nerds in those were the people that really fell in love, and that ended with us kind of pivoting back to focusing on the spreadsheet modeler and doing much better there. We’ve been throwing around this phrase that we came across in an article probably about a year ago or half a year to a year ago, which is love is growth. And essentially what that stands for is when you find the people that love your product, they will accelerate your growth. That’s where kind of your growth will come from. So we’re really doubling down on the people that not merely kind of like grid and can use it for kind of everyday tasks, but the people that love it. For some of whom we’ve become a kind of transformational thing. 

Hjalmar Gislason
There are more than a handful of users that I’ve gotten to know personally that they make their living off of turning spreadsheets into grid and selling access to them, essentially turning their spreadsheets into software as a service that they then charge others for using and being able to enable something like that is very fulfilling to us, but it also shows that it’s obviously not just a nice to have for them. If went away, it would change their life quite dramatically. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we’ve built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. As I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of times, entrepreneurship is almost glamorized in the media, and you only hear about the good stuff, acquisitions, fundraising, growth, things like that. But from my conversations, I’ve also learned that all founders have points where it just gets low, things get really hard. 

Brett
Can you take us back to one of those low moments that you’ve experienced so far, building the company and then just talk through how you navigated that low point? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah. So you are asking this question at a very interesting point in time for us because we’ve just gone through significant downsizing of our team because of just on the one hand, changes in the funding environment and on the other hand, kind of as we’d been going after usage growth and user growth over revenue, the product market fit between the company and user base that we had built and the vc environment the way it is now just wasn’t there. So, yeah, we downsized to make sure that we have a Runway and kind of are in control of our own destiny, probably kind of to the point. And we decided to cut deep and make it kind of so that we could see to a point where we could just sustain the team on the revenue that we have. 

Hjalmar Gislason
So, yeah, that was definitely like going through, and this is very recent, we’re talking about this summer, the lowest point and probably kind of the lowest point in many ways in my career, where realizing that this is something we had to do, that we had to lay off a couple of dozen people, a part of a great team, all fantastic people, but there was no other way. The alternative was essentially keep running until we come to the edge of the cliff and then fall off that, and that’s in nobody’s benefit. So very challenging moment there. I’m lucky enough to have a very good team of co-founders and managers in the company with me, so went through that together. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Also a lot of good mentors and I think kind of I go back a lot in kind of navigating that to a call that I had very early on. It was a pretty hectic time. We’re probably talking may here where on the one hand were still having some fundraising conversations with vcs, but they weren’t going terribly well. There were a couple of inbound m a talks also going on. So were determining whether we wanted to taste those and kind of see where those would go. And then kind of the third alternative, you know, we’re not going to be able to fund our development at the same pace as before, so we may have to make big changes. 

Hjalmar Gislason
So I call up a friend in the valley who’s working in M A and tech and has done so for a decade and a, you know, get him on the phone and I blurt out kind of everything I’m thinking like, this is the situation. This is what we’re thinking, this is who we’re talking to. How should we approach this? And so on. So I probably kind of talk without a breather and giving him an opportunity to get the word in for five minutes before I finally finish that run. And he says, okay, all right, there are three things that are important now. Eat well, sleep well, and keep exercising. And then kind of, he stepped into. Okay, so here are then some of the ways I would think about your situation. 

Hjalmar Gislason
And I just found that to be such a kind of, even though it’s in some ways a given, it was just such a good reminder that even going through the hardest things, and even though you think that working 24 hours a day is going to solve the problem, taking care of yourself is very important because that’s how you can then take care of others as well. And that was, again, something that really helped. 

Brett
I was watching an interview a couple of months ago with Bill Ackman from the hedge fund Pershing square. 

Hjalmar Gislason
I don’t know exactly how to say. 

Brett
I think it’s Pershing square, but he was saying the exact same thing. The interviewer asked, know what’s your advice to people who are navigating this? And his number one thing was taking care of yourself, which sounds like such basic and obvious advice, like almost the advice that your mother would give you. But I think it’s very hard to do when you’re sitting there in the trenches fighting for the company. It’s so hard to remember to do that. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah, absolutely. And then because you asked how we navigated this, the other thing is, team is very important to me. And I like to say I’m good at building two things. I’m good at building technology, and I’m good at building teams. And once you’ve built the team, then it obviously hits hard when you have to disassemble or make big changes to that team. But approaching that in many ways in the same way as building the team, just with kind of empathy and kind of thinking about how you can also help the people that are affected by something like this navigate it the best way possible, is something that, it took a lot of work. There was a lot of hard work that went into doing this. 

Hjalmar Gislason
I don’t want to say, well, I want to say kind of as well as possible or as not badly as possible, but it paid off. Like, there are no burned bridges. There were hard times, for sure, but there are no burnt bridges. Everybody understands where the decision comes from and so on. And most of the people have been able to land really interesting jobs pretty quickly after the change and we have been helping with that as much as possible. I guess you can hear kind of through this that I tend to put people very kind of high on my priority list. And this was an example where that definitely paid off. 

Brett
Yeah, that’s amazing. Now, when it comes to fundraising, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 16.5 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout that process? 

Hjalmar Gislason
I guess there are a couple of things. First of all, fundraising is a sales process, so it’s at least worked well for me. Just think about it like any other sales funnel, we can start wide, that you have your total addressable market, which is the market of all the VC companies out there that are probably around 3000 in the world. They are not all going to be good leads. So you have to weed them out and kind of figure out who are the leads that either have shown interest in you or are kind of investing in your category and so on. So qualifying the leads as you would with any other sales process, and then it’s, again, it’s like a sales process as you work them through the funnel, define your kind of funnel steps. Where are we? Who are the decision makers? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Have I gotten to speak to them yet? Or are there still some gatekeepers in the conversation and then kind of gradually moving the VC closer to that closing point? The difference in some ways is that sometimes there is competition, sometimes you are typically only going to sell this to one lead investor, and if the stars align for you may have more than one fund to choose from in the end. But apart from that, it’s very much like any other sales process. And thinking about it that way, making sure that you document every interaction that you understand, kind of who you’re talking to and what’s their position within the fund and so on, you can take a lot from just essentially enterprise sales and apply that to the VC world. 

Hjalmar Gislason
The other thing that has stood out for me is, and I think more about it now, maybe in light partly of kind of the changes that we had to go through this year, is that when I take in money from an investor, I see it as my responsibility to do my best to make the best return on that investment possible for the investor. And the more money you raise, the bigger an outcome you have promised to aim for. 

Hjalmar Gislason
And I don’t think we talk a lot about this in the startup industry in general, but you are closing a lot of doors, you’re closing a lot of opportunities also when you decide to take on, especially when you decide to take on a big round of funding, because a mediocre outcome is no longer possible, something that might be great for kind of you and the team is just no longer an acceptable outcome for stakeholders in your company. And that’s not a bad thing. We couldn’t have built something like grid without the outside funding that we have got. But I think that we founders, we would be well served by often thinking about, okay, what are my options? And by going the typical stuffed up VC funding route, what are some of the doors I’m closing? And am I okay closing them? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Or would I rather maybe just want to build a lifestyle business where I can work with some good people on something that is a great outcome for us, but would never be fundable in the kind of typical vc world? So I think probably we’ll see now, with the change in the funding environment, I think we’ll probably see teams think about this a little bit more. It’s just been like you hear all these stories like you talked about in the beginning of kind of companies that are getting funding and kind of the great outcomes that you see and so on, that you get pulled in. But now this is impossible. So I think people will start to explore kind of a wider range of options. And often many types of businesses can be built without. 

Hjalmar Gislason
They will be built slower, but they can be built without taking in a lot of money. 

Brett
Now, we’re getting into the final couple of questions here, since we’re almost up on time, so I’ll just leave it with two more. Let’s imagine that you were starting the company again today from scratch. What would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give to yourself based on everything that you’ve learned so far? 

Hjalmar Gislason
I think probably one of the things that I would pay more attention to is, am I building something that solves an existing need, that replaces something that people are already buying, or am I building something new that they still need and they will get a lot of value out of? But they need to be educated about the need. They wouldn’t think to look for it. And in many ways, what grid has built is the latter, which means that’s not better or worse. It just means that you have to educate the market a lot more, you have to educate your buyers a lot more, and it’s going to be a lot harder than if you are coming into a market with a replacement for something that they already know. 

Hjalmar Gislason
If you’re a replacement, you obviously have to better or cheaper in some way, kind of, you have to incentivize people to shift. So that may be hard. And the outcome, you are getting yourself directly into a very competitive market, whereas if you’ve really identified a new need, the outcome can be a lot bigger, but you are going to have to put a lot more effort into the positioning, the education, and the careful way that you build out the company’s presence and attention. So that’s something that I hadn’t kind of really put my head around enough when we started. And with a tool like bridge, which is very horizontal, it can be applied to a lot of different problems. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Positioning and messaging for those types of solutions can be really hard and you have to know to start with something that is a real pain point and often kind of only uses a small part of the capabilities of your product, but is really kind of solving for a pain point, because then people will learn about these other things that your tool can do as they start applying it to that kind of real pain. 

Brett
Final question for you, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building here? 

Hjalmar Gislason
So I’m a strong believer that spreadsheet modelers are programmers. What they’re doing. As soon as you start writing a formula in a spreadsheet, you are programming. The difference is that you’re encoding relationship between data that lives in cells in a two dimensional space, instead of writing lines of code that get executed one after another. But it’s all the same thing. You are building logic. I want to enable people that know how to build spreadsheets and spreadsheet models to become developers. And that is a big opportunity, because there are probably at least one, if not two orders of magnitude more people that already know how to build spreadsheets than know how to write code in the most common programming languages such as JavaScript or Python. 

Hjalmar Gislason
And if we’re successful in building out kind of the, we’re gradually moving more and more into essentially being on the crossover between no code solutions and spreadsheets. And as we get there and people start building out applications, what you’d kind of truly call applications using grid and their spreadsheet skills, I believe that can be truly transformational for a lot of these kind of everyday, often fairly simple needs that you have in business, for tracking different things and making kind of small applications to solve for everything needs within your business. 

Brett
Amazing. We are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap before we do. If there’s any founders that are listening in and just want to follow along from a company building perspective. Where should they go? 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah, so if you go to grid is, that’s our website and signing up for free, definitely give the product a spin and you’ll also find our social media presence where we are pretty active in posting the latest. 

Brett
Amazing. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Yeah. 

Brett
Mer, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I’ve really enjoyed this and I know our audience is going to as well, so I really appreciate it. 

Hjalmar Gislason
Likewise. Thanks, Brett. 

Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode. 

Hjalmar Gislason
You I close.