David Kircos

David Kircos is co-founder and CEO of Quadratic, a browser spreadsheet that runs Python, SQL, and JavaScript alongside ordinary formulas and can write that code with AI. Based in Boulder, Colorado, and trained in finance, he started Quadratic with Peter Mills after years of gluing code and spreadsheets together to report numbers to his team.

Financial models at Techstars

Before Quadratic, Kircos launched and sold a fintech company called Challenger, then worked at Techstars building financial models and writing software to track the finances of venture funds. His stack was Python for analysis, SQL for pulling data, and spreadsheets for sharing results. “Building data models is best done in Python, but many of my team members only understood spreadsheets,” he told TechCrunch. He said he spent “about 10% of my time on valuable analysis and 90% on building infrastructure and pipelines to generate reports.”

A spreadsheet drawn like a map

Quadratic is written in Rust compiled to WebAssembly and draws its grid with WebGL, which Kircos compares to the tiles of an online map so users can zoom out over a large dataset and pan smoothly. In a filtra.io interview he said the team picked Rust because it “cares a lot about program correctness and stability, which is super important in spreadsheets,” and because the language attracts strong engineers. Python runs inside the browser as well, which he says means a sheet that works on one person’s computer works the same way on a coworker’s.

Aiming at business intelligence work

Kircos positions Quadratic against dashboards such as Metabase and Tableau, for teams that analyze data in code and then share it with people who live in spreadsheets. “I think if we just rebuild Excel with Python in it, that’s a failure,” he told filtra.io. Many early users came from finance, the field where he first ran into the problem.