Yesterday, I was interviewed by TVB Pearl Money Magazine, a local TV program, about startup funding, particularly VC funding. I’m no expert but EditGrid did run through a few stages and was supported by different types of fund including bank loan, angels, government fund and VC.

If you are doing a startup, perhaps the following Q&As may be interesting to you.

1. Background on your business (nature of what you do).

We make online spreadsheet: EditGrid. It runs on a “Software as a Service (SaaS)” business model.

2. Can you take us back to the beginning of your business: How did you start? What was the first thing you had to do? Where did you get funding?

We started the company before we graduate from HKU. We graduated in 2004, one year after the disease SARS hit Hong Kong badly. The opportunity cost of doing a startup cannot be lower.

The first thing we did was to build a team by pooling all the best people I can find at that time. We had some ideas to start with, but honestly it tends to change a lot down the road when we have more knowledge to generate better vision of the world. We always put the team first, thus our company name: Team and Concepts - team is before and more important than concepts.

Then we needed money. Our solution was to borrow. When you do startup, you need to take the risk.

Later, we have angel investors and government funding. But they usually come in after you’ve something more solid.

3. Moving on to VC funding: at what point did you decide to seek venture capital?

The way VC really works is to have money chasing deals. VCs are in the business of funding the best investment opportunities they can find. Probably you will know you are ready when you are tracked by a few VCs who actively approach you and try to know more about you, your company and product.

To reach this point, you need to build traction. That’s buzz around your product, users using your product, customers paying your product, big name partners working with you, etc. VCs want to see where you are now more than where you will be in the future. VCs want visibility of exit. I would say a business plan and a quality team is NOT what they want the most. They want to see some solid execution that has already been done.

4. What was the process like? How do you go about doing that?

A VC approached us and looked at our company, determined we have potential but a bit early stage for them. He made lots of referral to some series A VCs. A few of them found us interesting and send a representative to visit us in our office and watch the demo. Some asked me to make a demo to all their partners in Beijing. (note: VC tends to have all partners in the company endorse a deal before they move forward). The term sheet was signed a few days after the meeting - before I left Beijing. It was fast. From that point to cash in bank took about 2 months.

We didn’t submit any business plan. The key part of the subsequent due diligence was a number calls to our clients and partners.

5. What are the pros and cons of selling stakes of your business to venture capitals or other private equity investors, for that matter?

Acceleration. Taking VC fund accelerate your success or failure. Of course, the VC will also enjoy a big part of your success at pay day.

With more money, we can hire good people and can focus to do what make sense for our business.

6. Has anything changed ever since you got investors on board?

Our series A investor is WI Harper, they are good and entrepreneur friendly. So, they largely leave us alone to take our company forward and always be available to give advice and help when we need them.

If you have chance, try to take money from reputable VCs.

7. For those with an idea to start up their own business, what’s the best route to getting funding? When does private investment come into the picture?

Take risk for your company. Focus to do one thing and one thing only. Do it better than anybody else in the world. The market and the VCs will tell you when you are ready.

Why EditGrid macro? Rapid application development using spreadsheet as a component. Enhancing spreadsheet to add custom features. Mashing up data from Web 2.0 web service providers.

JavaScript. EditGrid Macros are written in JavaScript, not in VBA. Use a modern language, instead of learning another (otherwise useless) proprietary language. Use the comfortable and familiar C++/Java syntax. Write in OOP and higher order functions.

Powerful. EditGrid Macros can create forms, which are defined using HTML (plus CSS) and manipulated using DOM. You can add everything you would add to your blog/website e.g. YouTube video and Google Maps. It is also possible use SOAP and REST to retrieve data and manipulate other data from other sites, enough for mashing up with other web services.

Asynchronous. EditGrid Macros are executed independent of the spreadsheet. It does not block other spreadsheet features like when you make a blocking function call such as VBA’s MsgBox(”text”, vbYesNo). This is essential to spreadsheets with Real-Time-Update across collaborators. By executing macros on the client side, we ensure that macros can provide the best interactions towards users, while can still access spreadsheet data and operations on our server side.

We put our money where our mouth is. Instead of writing some Hello World alike macros, which our competitor did, we decided to write something inspiring & useful.

Custom Behavior

• Create your own keyboard shortcuts
• Sift out duplications with a mouse click
• Play a game of Blackjack
• Cockroach spotting and kill stats
• Text to Columns
• Conditional Formatting

HTML Toolbox

• Format a range with table designs
• Date Range Picker
• In-Spreadsheet Form

Mash-up

• Retrieve coordinates from Google Maps (by clicking on the map)
• Map your location on Google Maps (by typing an address)
• Monitor current and historical currency exchange rates
• Encrypt the spreadsheet contents (Note: this is not for security, just for fun)

Gconnect.in, a community website for government officers in India, has picked EditGrid’s calculator widget to publish a few calculators for a new pay scheme.

They are highly popular. At peak hours, the spreadsheets see thousands of concurrent users. In a few days, they have been visited more than 1 million times. Finally we have a spreadsheet that can challenge the popularity of the adr spreadsheet regularly visited by thousands of people every day.

It also seems to us that these popular spreadsheets were moved to EditGrid from another service.

Well, competition and choice are always a good thing for end users.

In our recent release, we have made available a few new REST API calls targeted for some specific use-cases, including new authentication method, cell styles and management of deleted books and old revisions.

The newly available calls are:

1. auth.createSessionKey()
   An alternative way to authenticate an API session. Use this API if you feel it safe to send usernames and passwords from your app.
2. cell.setStyle(), cell.setSize()
   Allow changing the color of cells and row column heights.
3. cell.setInput()
   An easier way to update a range of cells to the same input value. This method does not require you to pass the values in the request body as in cell.set().
4. worksheet.updateLinked()
   Updates (freshen) a linked sheet from API. Note that you’re still bounded by the same 15 seconds minimal interval between two consecutive updates.
5. workbook.clone()
   Clone an existing workbook to create a new one, copying all its content.
6. revision.create(), revision.get(), revision.mark(), revision.query(), revision.rollback(), revision.unmark()
   A full set of APIs for you to manage the old revisions of a workbook.
7. user.list(), user.query()
   For organisation admin to get a list of all users in your organisation.
8. workbook.delete(), workbook.restore(), workbook.purge()
   You can now delete (and undelete) your workbooks from API.

See the REST API reference for a complete documentation of all the functions.

However, we have deferred the following functions due to technical reason:

• make available last modification info on cell
• export individual sheets

We will make then available as soon as the difficulties were solved.

If you have any problem, feel free to post them in our forum.

It’s been a while since we’ve updated you on what’s been keeping us busy here at EditGrid. Today we’re excited to announce a new core feature for the EditGrid platform: Data Functions. But first a little background…

The Competitive World of Spreadsheets

EditGrid has some tough competition. In fact, we often hear from friends how impressed they are with EditGrid’s product usually followed by a comment about how incredibly difficult it must be to compete with Microsoft and Google in this market segment. We’re well aware of the challenges we face. Between Microsoft’s dominant desktop productivity suite, Google’s brand and web presence to help it grow its web-based suite, and the incredible pool of resources at both companies, to say that EditGrid is an underdog would definitely be an understatement! Nonetheless, the strength of our competition has forced us to stay focused and relentlessly work on improving our product and user experience. As part of our drive to compete in this market we’ve decided to focus on data as a way to help differentiate us from our competitors and help our users create more and better spreadsheet content.

Data and Spreadsheets On Demand

EditGrid has come a long way in the last year and half. Today we offer a critical mass of spreadsheet features such as functions, formatting, and shortcut keys (sorry, no pivot tables just yet!), which make EditGrid as usable as your desktop spreadsheet. In addition, we’ve added a critical mass of web features such as sharing, collaboration, and publishing, which allow EditGrid to serve new use cases for spreadsheets on the web. Today we are taking our first step towards delivering a critical mass of data as well.

To get things started, we’ve made available stock and news data from Reuters, and partnered with StrikeIron and Xignite to expose some of their API data and services in EditGrid. In total we’re launching with 41 functions in 7 categories - all of which you can use to pull live data directly into your spreadsheet for further analysis or presentation. See the complete list at the bottom.

By delivering both data and spreadsheets on demand, we can significantly enhance the value of our standalone spreadsheet component. Easy access to live and automatic data will help our users create compelling spreadsheet content that will motivate increased sharing and collaboration in EditGrid. With today’s release it’s now possible for our users to create advanced valuation models and summary sheets for stocks, or to analyze trends in web startup funding and traffic, to name just a few of the possibilities. Of course, we’ll continue to add more and more data to EditGrid and are confident that in both the near and long term there will be exciting developments on this front. Be sure to drop by our forum to tell us what data you want as well as to share your work with others.

Here are a few examples:

Live data from Alexa, Compete and Yahoo! Finance is used to calculate a startup valuation.

Analyst estimates and recommendations come together in this spreadsheet to help you compare a stock with a few of its competitors.

Enjoy!

Over the weekend, we spotted some unusual activities in our email system. A user had abused our system by using our Invite Friends function and sent out invitation emails which included a private message that solicit personal and/or financial information to his/her list of recipients. It’s unknown how many were affected, but would like to inform all of the situation.

If you have received an email from an unknown sender and by way of the EditGrid domain over this past weekend requesting personal information, bear in mind that it might be spam or a possible phishing attempt. Please note that EditGrid will never ask for passwords nor will we ask for financial-related information in emails.

In response, we have banned the user, set a limit on the number of invitations you are allowed to send and we are also seeking additional ways to improve so this and similar activities will not happen again.

We want to remind everyone that EditGrid will not tolerate this type of activities. We take user privacy seriously and our Privacy Policy outlines EditGrid’s commitment to protecting our users’ privacy. Those registered users who fail to abide by the Terms of Use will be dealt with according to the Terms.

The Sichuan earthquake which struck last Monday has brought more than 32,000 dead and 220,000 injured, in addition to making many more homeless.  The whole EditGrid Team has been very concerned of the earthquake’s impact and has been tracking the earthquake closely.

As a tiny token of our empathy to those affected by the natural disaster, we have pledged a HK$30,000 donation to the relief effort.  We know we are not in as good a financial position as the other Chinese Internet giants’ to make substantial donation — what’s important is that we think we’ve done our part.  And we encourage all our users and readers to consider donating to the relief aid fund as well (see this spreadsheet for more details), if you haven’t already done so.

Today marks one week since the earthquake struck and also sees the start of a 3-day national mourning period.  During these three days we’ll re-paint the EditGrid site banner black as a sign of mourning.  Spend a little thought over to the earthquake victims whenever you notice the mourning black banner — they’ll need and appreciate every bit of your concerns.

Update: our user war-god, publisher of the most popular spreadsheet on EditGrid, played his part as well:

(Contrast the above with the spreadsheet’s normal form as reported here.)

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Sichuan, China earlier in the week was so powerful that the impact was even felt here in Hong Kong, some 1500km away. While Hong Kong was not affected, the same cannot be said for those in Sichuan and surrounding provinces, where tens of thousands of familes have been impacted by this disaster. The estimated death toll has reached close to 20,000 with many still unaccounted for, not to mention the millions of homes that were destroyed.

We have created a spreadsheet with information pertaining to the earthquake, donation status and ways you can help out. Everyone is welcome to help update it with the latest information, stats and donation efforts.

Along with the many companies, individuals and governments who have made contributions, EditGrid’s parent company Team and Concepts is also doing their part by making a donation to World Vision Hong Kong to help the quake victims, our neighbors up north.

For those who want to contribute, you can do it through World Vision Hong Kong, or through other organizations. We have created a list of organizations from Hong Kong, China and US who are accepting donations to aid the relief efforts.