>When Visicalc was released, Perez became convinced that it was the ideal user interface for his visionary product: the Functional Database. With his friend Jose Sinai formed the Sinper Corporation in early 1983 and released his initial product, TM/1 (the "TM" in TM1 stands for "Table Manager"). Sinper was purchased by Applix in 1996, which was purchased by Cognos in late 2007, which was in itself acquired mere months later by IBM.[3][2]
TM1 is widely used as a way to interface with official ledgers.
Yup, I have. And had to deal with converting "this awesome tool that does X, Y and Z" to an actual multi-user app because it was just so great. You end up discovering that there are tons of miscalculations in these formulas that only surface when you start writing tests for them, and that a lot of the business decisions based on these tools had flawed assumptions.
Having said that, I love that Excel has democratized app-building and made it easier for people to solve their own problems. In terms of alternatives, I think it's more about the UI and mental model that people have when using Excel, not necessarily the functionality. There may be 1-to-1 competitors in terms of functionality, but in terms of UX, Excel is sort of king.
My first job out of uni was developing a devops pipeline for Excel spreadsheets after one went rogue and cost the broker trader I was hired by $10m in one fun afternoon.
An application I consulted on was a web interface that made heavy use of the Excel portions of Microsoft Graph so that the finance team could continue to send clients spreadsheets that they could adjust without also sending them the formulas to "steal" (and take other parts of their business elsewhere, to noticeable millions of dollars of project spending habit shifts). The finance team wasn't going to stop using Excel ("how dare you suggest it"), so it was wildly custom solution to figure out where formulas existed in any of the spreadsheets finance felt like giving to the app, build a custom UI for entering the inputs to those formulas, run those formulas most with Microsoft Graph cloud magic/some with other web libraries, and return the results.
If it were just about any other group than that company's "finance department" that so deeply wanted "just tightly wrap Excel in a web UI and leave the key computations as Excel formulas we can continue to edit in Excel because all we want to understand is Excel" project would probably have been rightfully laughed out of the room. Finance has the keys to a lot of companies and like keeping those keys for comfort in Excel.
I would like to see the finance team that codes all their own C code and is adamant it needs to be in Emacs, especially because if they are that deep in Emacs I'd be wondering why they are insisting on C rather than Emacslisp or something even more esoteric like GNU Guile or someone's custom Forth to Fortran compiler…
But to answer the question, that is where I finished. We weren't "okay with it" that the finance team insisted on a C# to Excel files in SharePoint/OneDrive via Microsoft Graph turducken. We lived with it because the finance team had enough of the metaphorical keys to the car to be deeply in the driver's seat of that project. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and deliver what the customer wants.
I know a few people who use Quantrix for financial modelling. It is an exceptionally nice piece of software, basically the successor of Lotus Improv, with Improv's more robust and auditable separation of data and formulas.
I used Apple Numbers for all my spreadsheeting so it depends what you mean by "serious financial work". The vast majority of folk could probably get by without using Excel I am guessing.
> September 2025 – Nvidia signed a deal with CoreWeave to buy back its unused GPU capacity for $6.3 bln. This will purportedly allow CRWV's fleet to remain operational during periods of fluctuating demand. We believe this wording suggests that Nvidia could possibly mask any decline in demand for AI capacity within its business. Interestingly, Nvidia is one of CoreWeave's largest investors.
Does anyone understand this deal? Why would Nvidia ever buy back GPU capacity when Coreweave’s entire reason for existence is to rent GPU capacity to other people?
Well if nvidia has come up with a way to use all the compute (or resell it or whatever) then they are just assuming some risk to help out a great customer.
It doesnt even sound that evil, more evil would be to keep all the hardware for itself and become the only kinglord of all AI... but something tells me they know more about the limitations than all of these other companies for some reason
> Using comprehensive new data on U.S. venture capital deals, we find that founder returns remain extremely skewed, with 84% receiving zero exit value while the top 2% capture 80% of total value.
If a company’s crypto holdings are worth more than its market cap wouldn’t that mean I should buy the stock as its enterprise value is higher than its current market cap? Unless of course it’s saddled with debt which this article alludes to but doesn’t explain since most of the purchases seem to be for share buy backs?
> If a company’s crypto holdings are worth more than its market cap wouldn’t that mean I should buy the stock as its enterprise value is higher than its current market cap?
Well, one question to ask is if the company can actually cash out their crypto holdings at the current market price? If they have substantial holdings of thinly-traded crypto, the answer is usually "lol".
Faith in the company matters too. You can't compel them to sell, and if you think the company is going to slowly drive itself into the ground, you probably don't want to give them your $$$. There are quite a few companies that traded below their book value for that reason. IIRC, Kodak is a current example. Want to bet on that?
You would need a mechanism to extract that value- i.e. the ability to strip the company apart for parts. Buying a non-controlling portion of shares doesn't give you that ability.
Indeed. The decision-making apparatus is sometimes so starkly separated from the stakeholders that there's no reason to believe that the balance sheet and the stock price are likely to be correlated at all in the future. If the company doesn't pay dividends, and can't be sold off for its assets, then what is the function of equity?
I find Wall St. baffling for all the usual reasons, but this one is too rarely discussed.
If you see them returning value to shareholders in the short term, perhaps. But some of these DATs are giving their leadership massive pay packages (up to $400M[1]) so IMO they will sit on their treasuries as long as possible paying themselves huge salaries to... hold Crypto.
It can be a good strategy but take a while to play out. I planned to buy GBTC when it was $8 in 2022 for that reason but managed to not do so, darn it. It's now $70.
Wow the ramp note in there it links to is also wild. Half of that for employee liquidity!
> Last week, New York-based expense management startup Ramp raised its fourth round of capital in 2025 alone — a $300 million round at a $32 billion valuation.
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