A conversation with Rows CEO Humberto Ayres Pereira
Rows cofounders Humberto Ayres Pereira and Torben Schulz are supercharging spreadsheets from relics of the 1990s into cutting edge, more collaborative, and more easily integrated tools for teams — and they’ve developed their own leadership, communication, productivity styles, and more along the way.
Rows recently launched into public beta, onboarding over 10,000 new members. Now, anyone can sign up. We at Cherry Ventures first invested in the company’s seed round in 2016. Both my partner Thomas and I have been working directly with Humberto and Torben and feel incredibly fortunate to have witnessed the growth and creativity among the team.
As investors at Cherry, we engage with founders’ unique viewpoints and practices day-to-day. But in the grind and grit of entrepreneurship and building next-gen products, certain insights from said growth and creativity can often reside in the shadow of other headlines — which is why we want to shed more light on them.
Humberto, who also serves as the company’s CEO, recently shared some founder field notes and, dare we say, “superpowers” around Rows’ recent launch and the company’s larger evolution.
Humberto is a true product person, but, beyond that, he’s also a thoughtful leader and intentional communicator. With his team, he embraces total transparency. With his board, he pushes everyone to act like an MVP. With his cofounder, he instills total trust. And, with himself, he has discovered structures that work for him and sense for important signals.
In his chat with us, he touched on:
— Creating an empowering platform
— Product market fit as instinct
— Rebranding tied to investor and community dynamics
— Having 100.0% trust in a cofounder
— Building a transparent culture
— Treating learnings of coronavirus as a blessing
— Simplifying productivity and not always giving in to immediacy
— Embracing board meetings as signals
Creating an empowering platform
Filip Dames, Cherry Ventures: You went from Equals Magic, the name of your 1.0 version, to dashdash to Rows. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of Rows? And how, originally, the idea became the product that it is today?
Humberto Ayres Pereira, Rows: Since the beginning, Rows was always meant as an empowering platform. We wanted to pick up the spreadsheet concept but take it much further because we saw plenty of limitations where MS Excel and Google Sheets are at the moment. I think that we’ve always stayed true to that principle of creating a better, more modern spreadsheet.
The evolution started with an idea which we pitched to investors. Then we hired a very small number of people and started grappling with the basics of how to build a spreadsheet, and how to build one of our special new components — integrations. Our very early alpha started getting some interesting reactions and we started beefing up the team. We went from 10 people to 20 people, and now we are over 50. I think the product went from a couple of experiments around how to do computations, how to build a spreadsheet, how to talk to other services, and how to build Rows into what we have today, which we believe is the only real spreadsheet where you have integrations and a new sharing experience.
Filip: I remember when we were discussing the investment in 2016 we found out you were a big contributor on Microsoft Excel forums. So, you knew there was a big problem to be solved — for a long time. But how did it all start?
Humberto: Both Torben and I are from consulting backgrounds at McKinsey and Roland Berger. So, we’ve seen our handful of spreadsheets.
And I think people really value their skills in spreadsheets. You see it in the consulting world, and even in the startup world: people who are very good at spreadsheets, feel like they have a superpower. And that always stuck with me.
Within this cohort of people, there are 30 to 40 million people who are really mega ultra pros of spreadsheets and these people can make big spreadsheets talk to other services and run scripts and all of that. And so, since 2012, I started having this idea about this “spreadsheet OS.” People usually laughed at it and said, “Excel will never take over the world and spreadsheets are not that big.” But the more I spoke to business people, the more they validated it. And so, as we started evolving, we started searching online, we started searching on these forums. We found plenty of people asking questions “how do I do X with spreadsheets?” By then, I was also answering some questions on the forums and I think I became the top answered question for some small things on Quora and elsewhere.
It was kind of like a story where you have this very strong instinct and there’s some resistance, but mostly excitement around the idea.
Filip: I’d love to talk about this a little bit more about what type of businesses will be working with Rows? What do you believe right now will be the most important use cases? And what do you actually mean by being a “spreadsheet with superpowers”?
Humberto: We think of ourselves as a spreadsheet with integrations and with a new sharing experience. These are the superpowers — integrations and a sharing experience. On the integration part, we let any user connect to Salesforce, LinkedIn, Gmail, and a lot of other tools, like many other integrations, even your own APIs. And you talk to the services from the cells, with functions.
In terms of the sharing experience, I think one of the limitations which we saw on Google Sheets and Excel was that you see these immense grids where you get lost and you can accidentally delete formulas. What we have at Rows is one-click publishing, where you share a much sleeker, much more beautiful, much more robust version of your spreadsheet as a web app. Just share a link with people and what they will see are these awesome websites on the internet that can do all of the computations which you have in the background. These are the superpowers of the Rows spreadsheet — Integrations and Sharing.
I think in terms of the use cases, what we are seeing is a quite high adherence to sales, marketing, and operations. In sales, we see a lot of people doing lead generation and then connecting the spreadsheets to Salesforce. And on the lead generation part, people are picking up data from LinkedIn, from Google Maps, from those kinds of sources, finding companies and reaching companies. On the CRM side, it’s Salesforce, HubSpot, MailChimp, and a host of others. In marketing, we’re seeing people just gather sources — organic and paid — and building their own custom dashboards. You can mix and match data from YouTube Ads, and Google Ads and Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads and Twitter ads, like really any kind of ads. You can just pull all of that data in and build your dashboards with whatever you want. And that’s on the marketing side, on the operation side, we actually see something more, I would say, native to spreadsheet pro users, which is basically just building apps on top of spreadsheet formulas. We have people building their own CRMs. We have people building their own ordering platforms — like complete platforms! We actually have a couple of companies running their whole processes within Rows.
Product-market fit as instinct
Filip: How have you approached finding these use cases? If you’re building a product-led company, what would you generally advise founders going from the first version of the product to launch in terms of really nailing product-market fit?
Humberto: It’s a very good question and I’m afraid I don’t have a single answer for that! Right now, I would say that instincts matter a lot. They really do. You will feel it as a founder — and your team will feel it even stronger — whether the plan, the dream, the vision is 10% of the way, 20% of the way, 30% of the way, 80% of the way. So right now, as we are launching into public beta, it means that we feel like the vision is like 90+%. We have all the basic ingredients of a spreadsheet, we have all the formulas, and, also, the new stuff, integrations and sharing, are already pretty developed.
I think how we timed it was just by bursts of development. We developed for six months, then we brought in 10 or 20 people and they would give feedback. Then we would go away and build some more and then get more feedback maybe from 50 people and then go away. So, it was kind of in waves. Prior to alpha, we had about 10 to 20 people, in our alpha I think we had about 1000 people, and, now that we’re in beta, we’re talking about more than 10,000 people involved. And this is how we scaled.
In some cases people are telling us Rows is actually making them money. This is the best thing you want to hear. It does take some time, especially on large platform products.
Rebranding and the investor dynamic
Filip: Can you talk about the transition to Rows and what you’ve learned from this rebranding process and picking the right partner?
Humberto: I would say, most of all, this is one of the areas where having the right investors pays off. I think a large number of investors would have said, “Why are you rebranding? This is a total waste of time, blah, blah, blah. It’s not meaningful.” But we really believed in a better brand.
A big part of the spreadsheet component is the community and so our vision includes a large community component, some of which is already live, like the sharing of spreadsheets. You can exchange these beautiful, sleek web views of your spreadsheet without people having to understand what’s in the sausage factory, the formulas which are underneath.
We just, overall, wanted a better home for the spreadsheets. Something which would mean something to spreadsheet users. Our guiding thought was, when you hire someone for your team, you add a “row” in your HR file. When you book a new customer, you also add a “row” in your revenue and your invoices. And, so, we saw rows as these dynamic elements that explain the growth of the business. That’s what we are about, about growing what goes on in people’s businesses. And so we decided to rebrand to Rows.
Now, operationally, this was still complex.
The first part was finding a suitable name that was trademark-able and that meant something for the product. That was a job for the internal team. We had to go in deep and talk to all the sellers of domains and find one that was appropriate and also for the appropriate cost. So, we had a number in mind that we wanted to pay. Then picking the right partner, again, was a matter of investment. So, we created this super thorough RFP — requests for proposals — that had everything we wanted, everything we tried to learn about the user, like, these are the types of people who use our product. It kind of directed the point where we wanted to have more effort, which was the visual identity, the colors. We wanted it to be edgy, but also respectful of the spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are pretty robust. And so your name has to be robust, your logo has to be robust. You don’t want to have something very wiggly that points to the users that your platform might break or might change too fast.
In the end, how we picked our partners was we wanted someone who had created a brand for SaaS. We wanted someone who had created a very ambitious brand, which had grown a lot. We wanted someone who had taken this within a pre-existing brand and did the whole rebrand. And like only two or three international studios were left and, out of those, we conducted interviews and we picked up the ones who we got the best feeling — which was 90% how they treated us in the process, and how much confidence we got from them. You would be surprised that when we were willing to spend a significant amount of money on this rebrand,some agencies just didn’t pay enough attention, didn’t answer emails the right way, forgot some questions in the RFP, like some very basic mistakes. And we also chose a separate operational partner just for implementation. We got someone to design the brand and create all of the creative assets, including communication and guidelines for writing, etc. And then we got someone else, a cheaper and leaner, faster agency, just to build stuff. And so they overlapped. As soon as the first elements started coming in, the second agency started working. So, we delivered the whole project, the whole rebrand of everything, in about six months, which was pretty good.
Rows wrote about its entire rebranding process on its blog. If what Humberto said above strikes a chord or piques an interest, it’s definitely worth a read and saving.
Having 100.0% trust in a cofounder
It’s probably worth a single conversation on its own. But just since the very beginning, it has worked super well — and we are very different…I think, why it works, is that we have 100.0% confidence in each other.
Filip: I would love to just take a little step back and talk a bit more about the team. Let’s start with the person you’re spending the most time with. You and Torben go back a very long way. You had another business before Rows, EatFirst, that you started together. How important is this trust and friendship between Torben and you? How do you split? How do you argue? And how do you make sure you stay productive?
Humberto: It’s probably worth a single conversation on its own. But just since the very beginning, it has worked super well — and we are very different. And we argue in very different ways. Torben runs very productive discussions with very objective points, whereas I’m mostly on the destroy and re-do part. I think, why it works is that we have 100.0% confidence in each other.
There was never a single moment where I thought something he was saying was detrimental to me or because he wanted to grab something that he didn’t have. Not a single time. And I think that this is the best part of the relationship.
I think that, operationally, how we split work, has changed since the beginning. When we started, because I was the product person, the platform person, we decided that it was better if I started out as a CEO. And I also pushed for this.
I think that as time progressed, we found out that there were areas which were worth trading and there were things that were worth doing together. For example, we’re just now reaching 50 plus people, we are going to 60 now, and it became clear that Torben and I needed a streamlined way of talking to the team and that the two of us should appear together as CEO and COO in the monthly evaluation of how things are going, etc. So, we recreated this forum. And actually, we’re now doing more stuff together in this sense — as in giving overall feedback to the team — whereas in the past, we were running each of our streams alone and respecting each other. However, we see that we are uniting to give this broad feedback to the team.
Building transparent communication and culture
We have a very well defined mission. We communicate a lot. I think one of our key HR things is super documentation.
Filip: You started with four people, you kept it extremely lean for a long time and really, really thought carefully about who you would add. Can you talk a little bit about your hiring policy at Rows and how it also influences your company culture?
Humberto: First of all, yes, we did bet on professional HR, since the beginning. Having someone who understands the need for talent, someone who understands the nuances of talent, someone who understands the pace of hiring, and how much the team can take in terms of the cultural change, this was awesome.
Torben and I are very bullish about startups. And we will always be building companies, I think, for the rest of our lives. But we are also conservative at heart. We don’t like to stretch beyond what we see we can handle. So, since the beginning, when we hired a person, we always asked, “Okay, can we take another person and make them really succeed?”
This is kind of like the rate of hiring — are we feeling like people have a place to succeed, have a clear mission, have excitement. I think where we got it right was always to hire someone when you have a job, an exciting job, an exciting mission when the people who are going to take this person, their team, are also excited about the prospects of growth. And, obviously, this comes from providing clear insight, clear goals. We have a very well defined mission. We communicate a lot. I think one of our key HR things is super documentation.
Everyone on the team can see every meeting that takes place elsewhere in the company. Even meetings with investors and with users. Everyone can see how much money we have in the bank, how many people we hire, how many people have decided to leave. They can see all of these historic objectives and how much we nailed them or by how much we failed them. I think that just this cultural point — being transparent about what we’re doing and why we are hiring and what we’re hiring for — this helps a lot.
The learnings of coronavirus as a blessing
It’s not that corona itself is a blessing, but the learning has been. We were put on a path of a forced learning and I think we came out of it better.
Filip: You guys have a special setup between Portugal and Berlin. Has that made it easier, in general, to cope with the coronavirus situation and people at home because you set up the company remote in the first place? What have been the sort of main struggles you’ve seen last year within the team, but also more generally as a company?
Humberto: It’s not that corona itself is a blessing, but the learning has been. We were put on a path of a forced learning and I think we came out of it better.
I think the most negative parts have been in terms of these loss of contact, especially for new people. And that’s also why we reinforce [a] team structure, so that the team knows that there’s only one decider, and the decider is the team leadership, who are part of the group which they are in contact with everyday. The more you know who is calling the shots, who you should call for help, the easier it is for you to develop and have a productive relationship.
And I think just overall, corona also made us be a bit more generous. In 2021, we announced that everyone on the team is getting an extra five days of paid vacation, because we feel like corona has really taken a toll in terms of rest. People are not as well rested as they were last year. Even when on vacation and on weekends, there’s some anxiety, which is palpable, you feel like the world around us is a bit different and people are just not resting the right way.
Corona has been this weird mix of learnings, very good learnings, and forced learnings. But then obviously, this came at a cost, like we know that people are struggling, even inside the company, some people are having a harder time to cope with what is going on. And this is a cause for concern.
Filip: Overcommunication is absolutely key and getting or keeping people in sync. And you can do some things around sort of events, of course, but at the end of the day, it’s much more about checking in from time to time, seeing how people are doing also on a personal level, allowing for some freedom when it comes to, taking care of the kids who are running around the house while you’re doing home office. I think it’s important that you have a good eye for these things also as a as a founder.
Humberto: Since the beginning, everyone was like, “Okay, of course, if you have kids to take care of, you should take care of your kids.” And this flexibility has proven it’s proven to be right. We’re not seeing a loss of productivity by any stretch. I think, if anything, we are in a much better productive stance right now. We know how to produce, we know how to create and adjust a roadmap. We know how to analyze data. We know what users are feeling, we know things we have to fix. So, I think that we are ready.
Simplifying productivity
I learned to not let the momentum of immediacy take my schedule.
Filip: How do you structure things and what are your “hacks” to be more productive?
Humberto: In terms of tools, I’m relatively low tech. I like using text files and GitHub and calendars.
I think the place where I bet the most is my process for the calendar. So, Monday mornings are always for my personal to-dos. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have the occasional meeting, but just generally it’s a block time for me to work on to-dos that I have — work alone. Afternoons are our group time. I have meetings with the team and I’m open to a lot of unscheduled meetings. Mondays and Fridays are where I tend to push the more broad scope meetings with everyone like having all-hands. This is kind of like where I book “broadcasting” moments. And then Tuesday through Thursday is where I have more refined things. Generally, Tuesday and Wednesday are when I book repetitive meetings with people who work with me directly. Then Thursdays are community time. That’s the time that I take to build things with users and to take questions from the community. So it’s a very strict schedule. So, mornings to work alone, afternoons to work in groups, Mondays and Fridays for broadcasting all the team stuff, Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the team(s) who works with me, and then Thursdays are for the community.
I learned to not let the momentum of immediacy take my schedule. There’s always something to be fixed. Sometimes it’s an invoice that has disappeared. Sometimes someone needs to fix a feature and everyone’s screaming that it’s the most important thing to do right now. And so I look a lot at “Should I be fixing this? Or should someone on the team be having this responsibility? Are we at the stage that it shouldn’t be the founder to solve this?” And we’ve done quite some reorganizing of responsibilities because of that. I think, at this stage, it’s where Torben and I should not be producing directly the work that affects the teams. So, they should have that responsibility and that ownership. We should always be providing guidance and feedback on what’s going on. And then, obviously, hiring and the cultural part.
Filip: I think it’s about clarity, as well, communicating this is my time to do X. So I think by just doing that, I think it reduces a lot of friction.
Humberto: Exactly, even in the team at-large. We have this rule for, for production people (so, for engineers and designers) that you can’t ask for cross-team meetings on Tuesdays through Thursdays. That is work time. People obviously can meet within their team or have something urgent. But group meetings and mixed meetings have to be Mondays and Fridays so people have three days of concentration for real work.
Embracing board meetings as signals
Filip: We invested in 2016 and then you added Accel in the cap table for Series A then Lakestar for Series B, plus brought on a few really good angels as well, like Christian from Pitch. Any advice to founders on how to deal with your investors — like what’s important, what to not do, maybe mistakes that you’ve done as well?
Humberto: I’d say always book time for thinking about which questions are important for the board meetings — and this would be like a full day per board meeting and then creating some protocol slides. What are the questions that people have? Or that investors should have? You should also ask them, obviously, but you will have the best questions, I think, as the executive team. Then putting them into these prototypical slides.
I think the good stuff that we have done is asking for help. I think, from hiring to whether we should do a rebrand to “are these the right cohorts or artists, right segments, which we should be betting on” to “who’s going to be the next board member? Should we get an independent board member? Who should it be? What’s the profiles available?” — all of that stuff, I think we’ve done relatively well. Also, keeping everyone happy by being upfront with all of the data — doesn’t matter whether the data is pretty or ugly — we always show everything. I think this is also something which we have done well.
We have also booked these outside meetings that we’re now running with investors, which are also fun. So, it’s not only the board, which is a very short environment, but also talking outside the board meeting.
And I think in terms of getting investors, the thing that I’ve learned across, I think 15 years of building companies is: go with the people who you have the feeling are the most loyal to you. I think loyalty is not appreciated enough. And loyalty, I don’t mean, like they have to take all the shit with which you want and they have to agree with you in a position. I like that we’ve had plenty of discussions with opposing views. But I think you have to build a business supported by people who treat you fairly and who understand the struggle of building a business. And I think not everyone, not every investor is like that. Some investors have only loyalty to the investment itself, not to the company. They’ll say, “Okay, there’s these percentages, percentages to be worth something. And then that’s it.” Purely economical. And that, I think, generates some pretty bad vibes for entrepreneurs.
Filip: I think one thing that they also doing well, is that you actually create the culture where people want to participate, want to discuss. And if you, as a founder, create a culture where everyone on the board, thrives to be the MVP of the board, right to really to add value to contribute to the discussion in a meaningful way and not just sit there. I think this is an incredibly valuable culture you can create at the board level and you will get so much more out of it. And, of course, the transparency and communication are key as well in order to enable such a discussion. It’s not shallow, but actually impactful.
Humberto: I’m glad to hear it also, because, sometimes, as a founder, you feel like you’re going to the board and the board doesn’t have the same view as you and it is all unfair and that they’re gonna be they’re gonna be pushing the buttons. You already know the problem, you already know the solution, the solution is already underway, you still have to go through it.
But it still is super rewarding to go through that because there is nothing better than a pure signal to the founder. If you pick your board right, they will be giving signals. Like every concern, every question — it doesn’t matter how untimely the question you might think it is — it’s always signal. Even if someone asks a question about something which you’ve just mentioned, to me it means that you weren’t clear enough. So, we always debrief.
The board meetings for us are really a blessing. It is a time to meet with peers, people who are as smart as you but who have a little bit less exposure to the operation, but who have more exposure to different operations.
