Tell HN: We (Causal) got acquired – thank you HN
Hi HN, I'm the co-founder/CEO of Causal. We just announced our acquisition: https://www.causal.app/blog/causal-joins-the-lucanet-group
Just wanted to say a big thank you to the HN community —
Everything started with this post from over 5 years ago [1] which gave me and Lukas (CTO) enough conviction to quit our jobs to work on Causal full-time.
A few months later we launched an Excel sensitivity tool [2]. In 2022 we shared how we scaled our calculation engine to billions of cells [3] and a few months ago we had a successful Show HN of Causal 2.0 [4]
The product is now used by 100s of startups (many YC companies) and we're excited for this next phase of growth within Lucanet :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704418
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625974
Huge news, congratulations!
I was building something similar back during COVID, as LTSE's Runway stopped being improve, Summit (usesummit.com) pivoted to being a no-code tool and Obvious (YC S21 perhaps?) shut down.
Instead of building it myself, I found and have been using Causal actively since April 2021 and advocating for it ever since, using it heavily for my latest three ventures and just last month for personal use. It's so far one of my favorite products to use, on level with Linear in terms of quality!
I'm not a commercial user and might never be, but it has been invaluable for me in my commercial and personal uses for budgeting and forecasting.
Hope you can fit in great at Lucanet, and try your best to keep the free model available!
That’s awesome! Thanks for using Causal and really glad you like it.
Nothing will change for existing users so you can keep using it for sure :)
Congrats!
A related question, if you don't mind me asking: was acquisition your initial goal when you founded Causal, or did you just receive an offer you couldn't refuse?
Thanks!
We didn’t have an end goal in mind from the beginning — we had the idea for the product and wanted to see if it had legs as a business, and then grow it and see where we could take it.
From what I recall, I don’t think this kind of acquisition was on our radar in the early days — we expected the startup game to be much more binary (massive outcome or bust), and this was the standard narrative at the time.
We’re fortunate to have landed in a middle ground that more founders should be aware of earlier on (and I think awareness is increasing).
Not a massive outcome by VC standards, but still a win for us, our team, our customers, our product, and our early investors, and not the end of the journey yet!
> We’re fortunate to have landed in a middle ground that more founders should be aware of earlier on (and I think awareness is increasing).
You mean the area 97% of businesses who don't go bust operate? I think most business owners are well aware of it. For some reason though, startup founders live in a different reality.
You're comparing unlike things here.
97% of businesses are things like "open up another pizza place in the corner", "franchise a McDonald's", "open up a town hardware shop", etc. That's what being an entrepreneur means for much of the world.
Startups, at least the kind that are usually built in tech, and which VCs usually fund, are an entirely different thing. They are pursuing innovation, trying to build a new product that didn't exist before into a real business. The majority of failures are various forms of product-market fit failures - the product either doesn't fill a real need, or else can't be made into a viable business.
You can totally build the first kind of business, even in tech. (I should know, I've done it twice.) But it's important to remember that it is different, and not confuse the two.
> Startups, at least the kind that are usually built in tech, and which VCs usually fund, are an entirely different thing. They are pursuing innovation, trying to build a new product that didn't exist before into a real business.
Is "new pizza place that makes dessert pizzas" really that different to "new financial modelling website that can import from Excel and Xero"?
I've also run multiple businesses, and the qualifier for startups seems to be less around innovation and more around self-labelling.
> "new pizza place that makes dessert pizzas"
That would be Brazilian pizza!
> Is "new pizza place that makes dessert pizzas" really that different to "new financial modelling website that can import from Excel and Xero"?
Yes. I mean, I'm not thinking of "dessert pizzas", which I guess is some innovation, I'm just thinking "another franchise of Pizza Hut" or something.
But yes, that is different, depending on what the modelling website is trying to do. If it's trying to build a high-growth product with a lot of potential customers and a lot of potential for growth, by building a new product that doesn't exist yet - then yes, that's a very different thing from a pizza place. The kind of questions they need to ask and answer are different, the kinds of actions they need to take are different, and their potential outcomes are very different.
> I've also run multiple businesses, and the qualifier for startups seems to be less around innovation and more around self-labelling.
I mean, self labelling as in "deciding I'm trying to build a high-growth product"? Then yes, obviously that's right, if you're not trying explicitly to do t then you're likely doing it wrong.
It's pretty self evident that there is a difference between something like Microsoft or Facebook and something like the corner branch of Target, no?
I think they meant the middle ground of an exit that is:
1. small by vc standard
2. still life changing for founders & employees
If you did it again, would you use AG-Grid, or would seek to own the table with something like Tanstack Table?
We bet quite early on AG-Grid and it got us very far. We’ve probably built one of the most customised AG-Grid tables out there.
I haven’t checked out Tanstack table much but given that it’s such a core component of the product I would like to build our own eventually. Doing that when you start out is probably not worth it though.
Not op but having been in a situation where I was facing the choice between ag-grid and Tanstack Table, I'd say, without hesitation : Tanstack Table. What you may "lose" in advanced features, you gain in flexibility!
Tanstack Table is a nice primitive to build upon, but ag-grid is in a league of its own in terms of feature set.
Could you give some examples?
Curious to hear about other people's experience with Tanstack. I built a complex app [1] around AG-Grid and here are my thoughts:
I would recommend AG-Grid for most data apps until a well supported alternative comes out. My understanding is that Tanstack Table is aimed at generic apps that happen to have a table. Perspective's [2] table component is most likely more capable than AG-Grids, but it needs significantly more documentation and examples.
AG-Grid has a particular way of building things that seems to map to well to pulling data from a database or basic webservice. AG-Grid works very well for this use case. The AG-Grid enterprise features are built around this type of data model too.
If your data is small enough to fit into memory (less than 50 MB), it works very well. AG-Grid doesn't have a connector to arrow or parquet (I will eventually write my own). For larger datasets JSON generation and parsing performance bottlenecks. Additionally Parquet/Arrow offers much better types.
Configuring AG-Grid is tricky, especially when you want config to be declarative. If you want to define your own custom rendering components, getting them to work properly per column when you want different renderers for pinned rows is tricky (my solution [3])
Support for the community version of AG-Grid is practically non-existent. I understand that they have an enterprise business model that charges for support. They don't seem to be interested in answering community bug reports or comments, even for generically relevant bugs.
I have a decent amount of trust in AG-Grid's community offering [4], I don't see them cannibalizing community features to put them in their enterprise offering. Their enterprise features are the main development focus of the team, particularly the charts. The charts offering isn't impressive compared to bokeh, plotly, or vega. It would work for line of business apps, but not for a userbase familiar with better analytic platforms.
All that said. AG-Grid has excellent documentation and examples. They examples are swappable between Javascript, Typescript, React, and Angular.
[1] https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo
[2] https://github.com/finos/perspective
[3] live example https://buckaroo-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/#/DF...
[4] https://blog.ag-grid.com/javascript-jabber-podcast/
Great write up -- hadn't seen Perspective.
Would Perspective work for a similar use case as Causal's where the data tables have a large amount of interactivity, tree-based information and/or master-detail style UI concerns?
We're building a product that is more oriented around the interactive DAG concept and less about big data. The snappiness of those examples is very impressive.
Macroexpanded:
Show HN: Causal 2.0 – Modern Financial Planning for Startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755858 - March 2024 (71 comments)
Scaling our spreadsheet engine from thousands to billions of cells - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000400 - July 2022 (109 comments)
Show HN: Excel Sensitivity Analysis Tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625974 - Nov 2019 (30 comments)
Show HN: Should you buy a house and rent it out? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704418 - April 2019 (243 comments)
Thanks @dang!
Congratulations! Joining Lucanet is like getting a super set of new booster rockets. It's epic to see Causal soar to new heights with their help!
Congrats!
Do you think the US flip made a meaningful difference (presuming you did it for US customer/investor access)? Lucanet is EU, so maybe it complicated it in the end
We started as a US company in 2019 to make fundraising easier, and I think this did have a material impact. It's operationally quite annoying, but chances are that we would have had to do it eventually, to efficiently employ US people without paying Deel extortionate fees
Thanks! Any tips for optimising the operational process? Most impactful thing that you did to reduce friction?
If you want to do it properly you need to setup an inter-company loan agreement, transfer pricing, you need accountants and tax specialists for both UK and US, ... so the costs will definitely be significant. I don't think there are any shortcuts. Ideally, you find an accountant that is familiar with this setup.
It did make the acquisition process a bit more difficult + US lawyers are more expensive than UK/German lawyers. It's still worth it IMO given how much easier fundraising gets.
Congrats! Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42004769
Excellent, well done. Looking forward to hearing a discussion about this on your podcast! Might you go chase some other startup ideas? Does this "validate" the career model of creating something new, for you? Or would you not do it again?
Thanks! Definitely keen to start something again eventually, but in no rush right now :)
Hey Taimur! Great job on the acquisition. Looking forward to seeing what you do next.
Thanks man!
congrats taimur! please do a podcast with ali again, love you both. am also keen on your assessment of the other spreadsheet/forecasting startups
Thanks! We hope to get back on the pod :)
I think the spreadsheet space is honestly super challenging. There’s lots of possible use-cases for these tools, but also, Excel/Sheets are great products that everyone already knows how to use.
I think if these products nail some core use-case(s) that are valuable enough to build the core business around, then this can probably get you to “escape velocity” and you can start to become a truly horizontal tool as traction and awareness compound. (This is the path we were going for)
Lots of spreadsheet type products have tried to stay very horizontal from the beginning and end up trying to boil the ocean, or ended up focusing on a dead-end use-case that isn’t valuable enough to reach that escape velocity.
> This is the path we were going for
are you implying your path will be changing in any way post acquisition? the announcement didnt make it seem like that (but ofc we all know things often change post acquisition)
We will likely stay focused on financial planning rather than go broad on all the rest of the spreadsheet use cases
Way to go! Congratulations and nicely done!
Thank you!
Did you pursue the acquisition? Or better phrased, was the company sold by you, or was it bought by Lucanet?
Lucanet approached us a few months ago, we were open to taking a couple of meetings to learn more, and they sold us on the acquisition pretty well
Congratulations Taimur! I started following you from your pod with your brother and was super interested in your foray into tech with a math background. It's great to see Causal take off over the years.
These damn math folks are out here trying to make everything multi- dimensional
Thanks man!
Congratulations on the merger. This is not a percentage-based commissary in the marketplace of ideas. Hope to see further uses of the "multidimensional spreadsheet." It sticks out at you in every axis.
6DoF Data?
Nice work! What was the hardest technological part about building the product?
Probably building our calculation engine - you can read more about it here https://www.causal.app/blog/scaling
Rendering grids/tables/charts in the browser is also quite tricky if you want it to be fast!
Hope this turns out to be a great exit for y'all! Congratulations!
Thanks!
Congrats! I don't know if you remember, but we had a nice chat over Google Meet about causality some years ago. We met not reddit.
How much did you make?
Without getting into numbers, it’s more than we would have been able to make at, say, a big tech job over the same time period (5 years)
Even if it was less it is still worth it because you did it your way and didn't rely on someone else to decide your fate
[flagged]
[flagged]
Please don't do this stuff here.
Can you clarify?
Please don't post ChatGPT-generated text on HN. You're very likely to be downvoted/flagged, which is what happened here. People here are capable of using ChatGPT themselves, and most of that text is not interesting in the HN sense.
Separately, I think the answer was clear to most people - they did better than other well-paying alternatives (meaning it wasn't a poor outcome / waste of effort from individual perspective), but they're not going to share the specifics.
Oh I didn't know there was a rule about that - I was just trying to save people a click or two. Noted for the future!
There is no rule about that and your use of chatgpt in this case is useful and brought data to a different perspective.
It is fair to ask if they got a good money for it or just a nice job
There certainly is a rule about it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That's not the same. OP used ChatGPT to improve an answer that didn't say much turning it into something tangible and that added value to the discussion.
It's exactly the same - it's not human conversation and the poster couldn't even assess what they were posting.
> the poster couldn't even assess what they were posting
Uhm disagree, I know what I was posting (doesn't seem it was against the rules either), I was trying to understand better the answer that OP had submitted as a reply to my first question.
It definitely helped me put it into a better perspective (i.e. no clue what an average salary at a large company looks like). That being said the answer to my question from the author still lacks enough details to make "total sense" in my mind - even after passing it through GPT.
This thread is kind of going on and on, but for whatever it's worth, the general rule is "don't post generated comments". We're not the thread police, but you're going to find that comments that are significantly LLM-generated are going to get flagged to death. We're here for human conversation. Maybe next time, just suggest "here's a prompt I used that got a good GPT 4o response, go try it".
Noted, ty, wont do it again - sucks to be downvoted and flagged but lesson learned
don't take it to heart, the content wasn't bad and in the context, a chatgpt answer made sense (in place of you using its content as your own message which would be weird).
It's no big deal! You shouldn't feel bad about anything.
I know what I was posting
I didn't say you didn't know what you were posting, I said you couldn't assess it which is a conclusion I reached by reading your comment which ends: "Not sure if that helps or if it's accurate". But like the mod comments say, HN is for conversation between people rather than a conversation between you and an LLM.
Congrats! Happy to join you on your incredible journey!
Thank you!
Congratulations and good luck on this next chapter!
Thank you!
You announce these big news so causally. Grats for collaborating with "Last Universal Common Ancestor".
Oh wow, congrats! I remember when you first launched this and followed you along on X (Twitter).
Ah awesome, thanks!!
Congratulations! Were you default alive prior to the acquisition?
With our current growth rate and no additional hiring we would’ve been profitable in less than 12 months :)
Congrats!
Acquihired or IP sell( with enough money for retirement I hope) ?
Product acquisition, we’ll be continuing to grow Causal at Lucanet, lots of potential to cross-sell into their existing customer base :)
Do you plan on staying with the company?
I think if I ever hit a real payday I'm done working.
Yup we’re sticking around and leading the Causal business unit within Lucanet
Congrats Taimur!
Thanks!
Congratulations causal team!!!
[dead]
[dead]
What is good about getting acquired?
$$$ It’s an exit strategy.
It can also be an advantageous continuation strategy. Being acquired doesn't necessarily mean giving up on the project, or losing ownership in it's future.
If you have a startup with a product, that product's path to further growth (and therefore its current and future value), can be expanded many times in the context of a family of synergistic products.
You can attempt to partner with existing synergistic products and companies. This can accelerate growth, but is also risky. Those other companies will likely see an opportunity to create their own competing version or your product.
That leaves creating synergistic products yourself, which may be a long road. Or being acquired by a synergistic company.
Either way, you end up owning a piece of a family of synergistic products, worth more together than apart, and with higher growth and stability prospects.
Whether its better to build out or get acquired depends on the risk vs. reward of the current context. If creating synergistic products reflects your strengths, and is open market territory, that is a great position to be in.
But if creating synergistic products is going to turn into an uphill battle of replacing products already on the market, then getting acquired may be a much faster safer higher value generating path.