The Idea: In 2016, two McKinsey consultants - Humberto Ayres Pereira and Torben Schulz - had spent enough years drowning in Excel to know one thing: spreadsheets were powerful, but deeply broken. No live integrations, no AI, no modern sharing experience. So they quit their jobs, moved to Berlin, and set out to build what Humberto had been dreaming about since 2012 - a "spreadsheet OS" that connected to the real world. Friends laughed. Excel was a 40-year-old product nobody was going to disrupt. They built anyway. This was the beginning of Rows.

The Execution:

• 2016: Humberto and Torben found Rows (originally called Dashdash) in Berlin, backed by an early seed round from Cherry Ventures, who saw their vision for a next-generation spreadsheet platform.
• 2018: Accel leads an $8M Series A to accelerate growth - the team gets to work building live integrations with business tools and onboarding their first paying customers.
• Feb 2021: Rows raises a $16M Series B led by Lakestar, rebrands from Dashdash to Rows, and launches into public beta with 50+ integrations - triple the user growth follows.
• 2022: The team puts up billboards outside Microsoft and Google HQs - a cheeky flex that generates massive press and signals they're playing to win.
• 2023: Rows launches its AI Analyst feature - letting users query their data in plain English - and the product clicks. User growth accelerates rapidly.
• 2024: 2.2 million total users. 17 billion spreadsheet functions executed. 8.3 billion data imports. The numbers finally match the ambition.
• Feb 2026: Superhuman acquires Rows in a deal estimated at $50-70M - nine years after two consultants decided the world's most used software needed a serious upgrade.

The lesson? Building in a category dominated by 40-year-old giants takes patience that most founders don't have. Rows spent eight years iterating, pivoting, and grinding before the AI wave finally validated everything they'd been building toward. The founders who survive long enough to catch their tailwind are the ones who never stopped believing the problem was worth solving.