> Both companies had arrived at a similar view of the future where AI will redefine every business application and workflow — and reinvent productivity as we know it today into a place where humans and AI work together everywhere you get work done. We want to rethink a suite of tools and come together to provide users and teams with their own AI productivity platform for apps and agents.
> We discussed each of our paths to achieving this vision, and while both teams felt confident in their paths, it was obvious that we would move much faster together. The way that each of us has approached this market is different but inherently complementary. And so the conversation became... “What if we merged the companies?”
> Over the next few days, through discussions with Grammarly CEO (Rahul Roy-Chowdhury) and the co-founders (Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko) we started sketching out what a combined company would feel like: how the teams would fit together, where the products could immediately integrate and amplify, etc. And we also discussed the leadership structure, and agreed that I would lead the joint company as CEO.
> With a round of sushi and some sake, we shook hands — excited to work together on the future of AI.
—
The idea that any acquisition, but especially this one, was minted in this fashion is hilarious.
Especially "acquistion" - he continually presents both sides as peers, collaborating - even mentions "merging: - but this never happens. Maybe the Coda people will eventually, someday emerge as the leaders, but this would be incredibly atypical. Even when two equal size companies merge someone is being acquired. Majority of Coda leadership will be gone in 6-12 months.
>> zuck pinged me to say "i'm not sure if this is a good idea yet, but i think maybe facebook should buy instagram, what do you think?" [0]
The next conversations also read as if they were happening over lunch, albeit with lawyers whispering approved language into each participant's ear [1]
As long as we live in a society of humans, there will be humans controlling millions of dollars, billions, trillions, and then yes, -illion dollar conversations do happen, sometimes randomly even. That's one of the purposes of all the country clubs, yacht clubs, galas, etc.
Business people spend their entire day talking about their business, that's literally their job. Sometimes business opportunities come from random discussions. Sometimes they are more like arranged marriages. And just like with marriages, the story that is told to the public might not be the actual story.
Grammarly has been having an identity crisis ever since LLMs made grammar checking accessible to every company at a fraction of the cost. ChatGPT is killing a lot of companies and grammarly was the first collateral.
This acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge concern.
But it's high time Grammarly evolves itself into some other product or die trying.
The other day, Grammarly marked a grammar error in my text. I wasn’t too sure about it, so I asked ChatGPT (4o) to explain it. It agreed with Grammarly. I wasn’t convinced and didn’t understand ChatGPTs justification, so I asked again but using the more advanced o1 model… this time ChatGPT said Grammarly was wrong.
… ChatGPT is good at improving grammar, but it doesn’t “understand” what it’s doing (by design), and doesn’t have a complete and consistent ruleset, which is what you want in a grammar checker. Also, grammar and style rules change with time, and you want to have good and precise control of what rules you’re applying.
I am perplexed by Grammarly getting progressively worse as time goes by. I am seriously considering spending a weekend or two on writing myself a small LLM powered clone. I think a browser extension for Gmail should be relatively easy. I am not sure about Word (desktop) and Google Docs though.
Is Grammarly anything more than glorified autocorrect?
Curious if anyone here uses it, and if so, what value it provides (I've been bombarded with its ads for years, but could never see what value it provides). Even a quick search of its website gives inanely basic examples (like correcting Ive to I've) [1].
I myself do not, but some people I know who are intelligent and articulate and also dyslexic struggle to get their thoughts expressed in writing adequately for professional life, especially in the “everyone live co-editing” environment these days. Many of them report Grammarly being a valuable tool for them to feel like they’re on a more even playing field.
So yes, fancy autocorrect, but apparently better enough to matter for them.
Having English as a second language, it was essential for me for a long time. I never understood why they never marketed to that public.
I don’t pay for it anymore because I am more comfortable in my current company where I am sure my colleagues won’t be bothered by frequent mistakes and misspellings. Also, for the eventual more important text that I want to be grammatically perfect, there is free ChatGPT now.
My CTO uses it, which is frankly, terrifying. We'll be in a shared screen session editing slides for a board meeting or very sensitive docs, and their little UI prompts are shining away.
...and it's not like it improves his grammar or spelling - they're still terrible!
Grammarly at least used to be deterministic and fast. Its edits are consistent and its mistakes are easier to spot. That alone is enough of a value proposition over LLMs, especially since their tech required years of computational linguistics research, whereas anyone can write an OpenAI API wrapper...
>his acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge concern.
The post is quite strange, though. It exaggerates the deal in a very artificial way. For example, "My wife asked me how to think about this — is it a beginning, an end, something in between? I told her that it felt like a clear chapter mark: the end of chapter one. A fantastic opening act behind us, but with many chapters to be written in front of us.".
Is there any indication that it was forced? It’s certainly plausible they people working at companies backed by the same VC would meet and get to know each other.
In the PR, they use some of the ambiguity around the term AI to claim it's AI native. It isn't LLM native, but they indeed were using things that encompass AI.
If anyone else thought of Panic, here's what happened with that Coda: https://panic.com/coda/
That's very disingenuous. Nova replaces Coda "Buy Nova, own it forever [...] $99 + tax includes one full year of updates and new features" Not getting updates forever != subscription
From what I can tell, Grammarly bought coda for 150M and a ceo position forced by the VC’s.. it was their only option. Yes I agree they are under the same VC’s. Grammarly has a leadership problem, and coda has a money problem. shishir has a huge influence in Silicon Valley due to his YouTube days. So yes, two companies struggling to survive. One has reputable leader living off his past success (not current) and one company with money but no leadership. It’s a lifeline for both and last chance to show they can be successful. I guarantee shishir has two years to prove he can be a leader or he is out of the game. It was way to save egos and hopefully make a good company.
Whatever the VC definition of a leader is, I was incredibly impressed with Shishir Mehrotra. His company and their practices are very mature and well run for their size and stage. I seriously considered joining Coda a year ago solely because of him. I hope he can find success with this new venture.
I am guessing based on the available information of revenue combined with the info about Grammarly issuing warrants the week before the acquisition announcement. So my reasoning isn’t an exact number but an educated guess based on available information
A bit surprised OpenAI didn’t acquire coda. Solid leadership team and the product would be a nice complement to OAI’s current portfolio. Lots of AI usage will seamlessly live in productivity tools which means OAI is disintermediated at point of use by its biggest rival Google (workspace) or its frenemy MSFT (office). Coda’s tools seemed well built and available for a fraction of the cost of buying eg Notion.
Readit News
> We discussed each of our paths to achieving this vision, and while both teams felt confident in their paths, it was obvious that we would move much faster together. The way that each of us has approached this market is different but inherently complementary. And so the conversation became... “What if we merged the companies?”
> Over the next few days, through discussions with Grammarly CEO (Rahul Roy-Chowdhury) and the co-founders (Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko) we started sketching out what a combined company would feel like: how the teams would fit together, where the products could immediately integrate and amplify, etc. And we also discussed the leadership structure, and agreed that I would lead the joint company as CEO.
> With a round of sushi and some sake, we shook hands — excited to work together on the future of AI.
—
The idea that any acquisition, but especially this one, was minted in this fashion is hilarious.
Well, in this case, the new CEO of the combined company is from Coda, so perhaps a little less likely than otherwise...
>> zuck pinged me to say "i'm not sure if this is a good idea yet, but i think maybe facebook should buy instagram, what do you think?" [0]
The next conversations also read as if they were happening over lunch, albeit with lawyers whispering approved language into each participant's ear [1]
[0] https://www.techemails.com/p/instagram-cofounder-on-mark-zuc...
[1] https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/C_od8rsvuiO
Business people spend their entire day talking about their business, that's literally their job. Sometimes business opportunities come from random discussions. Sometimes they are more like arranged marriages. And just like with marriages, the story that is told to the public might not be the actual story.
This acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge concern.
But it's high time Grammarly evolves itself into some other product or die trying.
… ChatGPT is good at improving grammar, but it doesn’t “understand” what it’s doing (by design), and doesn’t have a complete and consistent ruleset, which is what you want in a grammar checker. Also, grammar and style rules change with time, and you want to have good and precise control of what rules you’re applying.
Hold your beer, I built that https://chatgptwriter.ai
Leadership issue.
They switched from parse trees and rules to LLMs, presumably some things got better and some got worse
Then again, I can't imagine the struggle of having to rely entirely on libraries pre-internet
Curious if anyone here uses it, and if so, what value it provides (I've been bombarded with its ads for years, but could never see what value it provides). Even a quick search of its website gives inanely basic examples (like correcting Ive to I've) [1].
[1] https://support.grammarly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047727871...
So yes, fancy autocorrect, but apparently better enough to matter for them.
I don’t pay for it anymore because I am more comfortable in my current company where I am sure my colleagues won’t be bothered by frequent mistakes and misspellings. Also, for the eventual more important text that I want to be grammatically perfect, there is free ChatGPT now.
...and it's not like it improves his grammar or spelling - they're still terrible!
With Grammarly it's right here in the text box as I am typing.
And how does ChatGPT differ?
Deleted Comment
If anyone else thought of Panic, here's what happened with that Coda: https://panic.com/coda/
Pretty interesting twist. It’s almost as if Coda acquired Grammarly.