Asked 'Is Excel under threat?', Figma's CFO compares spreadsheets to the direct-manipulation tools his own company makes, arguing hands-on tools still beat prompting for building understanding.
…as our business complexity was staying the same, I think we probably wouldn't need the same number of people a year from now. But I think we only get there because you're doing a better job of finding these places and rhythms where you can build more consistency in the way that you're operating.
Is Excel under threat?
No, it's like my love language, dude. Like, I think in the same way I was describing how I, you know, I still think that case study is so important because you use it as a tool, right? Like you use it, you use it to build intuition. A lot of the output people are still creating is a model. I mean, that model could be, you know, you could host it somewhere else. It could be something else. But I think you want this tool to give you this ability to refine your understanding and play with things with your hands. And it's kind of like the magic that we see with Figma, right? Like we can give people the ability to go and have an initial stab in the first draft through prompting and through natural language. But sometimes it's so much easier to go and riff and make changes on your hand. Take a color wheel as an example. You've got a screen that you've designed and you're like, hey, I want to go and change the background. You could sit there in an agent and prompt it, right? Like go change the background from red to green. Or I could take the color wheel and you get all the different shades of it and you get the real feel of what's going on. Similarly, I think about that with Excel. It's the way I build trust, the…
I also grew up in Excel and I still use Excel to like organize my thoughts. Like if I'm trying to run an analysis, it's just even like the spatial organization of it. And I think the models aren't quite good enough to create a forecast or a model quite yet. But I think that organization is still…
Totally. And I also think, you know, part of the things that I've tried to experiment with now is like, how can I use, you know, how can I use, how can I use one of these models to help me better understand the output that a team is putting together? Like, if you give me like a, you know, a 20-tab…
The world we're living in is also challenging too. I was talking to a university professor the other day and I was asking him how do they teach AI at the university? So they don't right now. And one of the challenges that they said they had a course and within the semester, they've changed the…