I spent years inside Microsoft Excel building models, forecasting revenue, cleaning messy data. I hated it. Every time I thought there has to be a better way. Then last week I came across Shortcut. It's this AI app that plugs into Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and suddenly the tedious stuff becomes magic. So I invited the co-founder Nico onto the podcast. We built financial models in real time. We explored how shortcut works under the hoods and we talked about how to get the most out of this product. If spreadsheets are a part of your daily life, this episode will change how you work. Let's dive in. [Music] So, I reached out to Nico and I I think the DM said something like, "This is one of the most impressive AI demos I had ever seen. Can I use the product?" Um, and you said you'd come on to the podcast and share how people are using your startup shortcut. Um, it's kind of like Microsoft Excel if it was built in the future. Um, and I've never really been a huge Excel guy because to to be honest, it's been overwhelming to me. Mh. Uh, the macros, like I don't even know what a macro is. Right. Right. Um, so that's why I reach out to you. I just feel like there's an opportunity to like I know how valuable it is, but I I I I just I know how hard it is to use. Anyways, Nico, welcome to the pod. I want you to show me how how I could use Shortcut um to to make more money and be more productive and and I was hoping you can do so. Yeah. Uh thanks for having me. Super excited. Um I'm going to just share my screen and kind of get into it. Um I think I've been doing live demos for some time now and it's always just like the most possible fun way to do this. Um so kind of like you said, it's like Excel if it was built in the future very intentionally. It's like exactly Excel. you can do whatever you would possibly want to do in Excel and you would do it here. Um, and we had to recreate a lot of it to allow this. The big difference is that it's also a superhuman agent that can do most of your work. So like the good way to think about it is not as like a co-pilot for one or two steps. It's like it will do 90% of your entire job and then you get to do other things as that happens. So I can give you some examples, but again again it's just like Excel and it's not just for creating things from scratch. you can just open up existing Excel files in here and directly manipulate them. So, for example, here's like a DCF file um on Microsoft, which is like, you know, a pretty nasty model to have to make. Um and then from here, you can do whatever you want. You can just ask it, you know, to be updated. Um the best way to to really use it is to send it off and probably just come back in about 10 minutes. Um and one thing I want to show you, I guess this would be like a technical demonstration of how hard it is. Um but like I will say you know here is this huge DCF which can take up someone like you know half a day or a whole day to build. Hey, take this. Please update it and use the exact template that I want to use Google. Uh, now pull the, you know, 10Ks from 2022 through 2024 and, uh, you know, do forward projections through 2029. and it's gonna do it. Um, it's kind of crazy to watch. Um, I think it's fun to watch the first couple times, but again, you're gonna want to just come back to when it's done. Um, but Greg, the other thing I kind of want to address is like your question, which is like, how can people use this to make money and be productive? And I think the best way to do that or show you that is like to do exactly what I'm already doing right now or like I have to do today. Um, so for example, this and you you'll see that I can come back to and like have multiple shortcuts running at a time. Uh this is like dummy data. I try to make it look just like our data uh without giving away sensitive information. Um from our actual like revenues, expenses and its sources and like its types. And what I need to do for work is like build a P&L like pretty classic income statement. Um and specifically I need to project it out two years as well while looking one year back. And it's going to be like for our data room. uh this, you know, I know you're not a big Excel guy, but this is one of the most like common financial models you'll have to make on Excel U from rookie. I will say I'm not a big Excel guy as like a contributor to the Excel, but when people give me Excelss, you know, I'm loving it and I want I want to be able to manipulate it, but I'm scared I'm going to break something. Yeah, that's fair. Um there's like two actual major use cases right now or types of users or archetypes. Um, the ones that it's most sticky for are the people who are kind of Excel experts, but it takes hours of work and makes it like 10 minutes. But there's another class of people that like I'm learning more and more about, which is like they're not super strong at Excel, but this thing makes them almost like Excel gurus pretty quickly. Um, so we can even do an example together based on like what you want to do and like see how far you can take it and see how much better it makes you. Um, so here's like what that example was for me, what I needed. Um, and right before I do that, I actually will show you one thing. Sam Alman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so, too. Now, I think that you can look at trends uh to basically figure out uh what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com. Every single day you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it? People always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building and then we hand it on a you know silver platter for you to go check out. Um, we do have a few paid plans that, you know, take it to the next level. Uh, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it, but you can start for free ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. This is a kind of an interesting like user paradigm. One thing we've learned is like people specifically working on Excel aren't like extremely good at prompting um or and they don't even expect that the AI really greatly understands its subject matter. But when you show clarifying questions, it can make them better and it's kind of is like a first magic moment for people who use Excel a lot. So, you know, what are the growth assumptions I should use going forward? Conservative, moderate, aggressive. Let's just say like, you know, I want all scenarios. Let's make it hard. That's really cool. I've never seen UI like this, you know. Well, actually, I've seen like from time to time a a a code or chatbt will be like, can you refine it? And I love when it does that, but I haven't seen it built like productized like this. It's become one of the magic moments, which I just totally did not expect. Um, but users are really not that great at prompting. And I think GPT does something similar if you do deep research or if any of you guys use deep research a good amount but they almost they they like necessitate that that clarification but for us we actually want to make it context aware so that the clarification is even better. Um and users have like become much better at prompting because of this. Um so I'll do all scenarios. Um let's keep the same exact structure uh of the template and um you know update the data with the same metrics and charts. Um, again, I think this is like the most similar to real finance work, for example, is like you have your templates and you just want to update them. You don't want to create things from scratch. It's definitely like this is a maybe even like the hardest kind of work. So, it'll take that on. I'm going to go back to this example. I'll say, "Hey, I need to build a P&L for this last year of data and do a 2-year projected out." This is for my data room for VCs and bankers. Make it very professional. It's always funny to see like how it interprets that. Um, see how it goes. And what we can do also is like show you a third version of this and like something you want to try or that you think like would be valuable to you or or valuable to your audience. Uh, and we can give that a shot as well. Cool. I'm also like as you're going through this I'm I'm I'm just wondering like what is the what is the best way to prompt shortcut like is it long prompts short prompts do you you know h you've seen thousands or more of the prompts like what do you recommend to people yeah um it's a really good question uh in general I've always liked relatively vague prompts um because it forces the frontier models to really get creative um and then sus out clarifying questions from you so specifically ally because of our clarifying questions. I'd like less verbose prompts. I'd like less specific prompts and then that kind of encourages a little bit more creativity out of the model and then out of your clarifying questions. Cool. Um, so we'll, you know, we'll fill this out as well. I'll say do this over many different sheets. Cool. And it will, uh, get going from there. And meanwhile, I'll check in on on Microsoft. Um, so what you'll see here is it actually looked for the Google's data and the 10Ks exist in like an SEC database that's like super hard to find and extract, but it found these 10Ks and extracted them. Uh, 10Ks are like 100 pages of PDF material for for public companies. Uh, it found all of these Google 10Ks and is starting to extract the data. And you'll see it actually provided a task list here. So it's its current plan is to read and analyze all the current models, search for and download the 10K filings and extract these and then start to update the historical data and the drivers uh and the assumptions as well knowing that like the P&L and the dashboard are more formula driven and will be updated automatically if you can change the source material. That's crazy, man. That's actually like that's crazy. Uh yeah, it's pretty crazy to see. um you know and actually and we can talk a little bit into the the technical details uh as far as you think you know that's interesting um but these 10ks are so big and confusing and like horrible that you'll see that like we're running into context limits here you see in the in the in the file on the right side and it's actually aentically deciding well let me look at these like one part at a time or like one chunk at a time um so there's really no upper limit in terms of like how we can allow um agents to go over material I think historically a lot of lot of what we've been doing is rag in this industry. Uh but as agents can learn to start to search for chunks of information selectively and then compact their context as necessary that is that is changing dramatically. Yeah. I guess what this what's going through my mind right now is you know Excel has been around for how many years? 30 years. It's almost its 40th birthday. 40th birthday. Like Excel is a middle-aged person. Yeah. Yeah. per, you know, probably a middle-aged man, gray hair, um, you know, khaki pants. Yep. And, uh, you know, when I'm looking at this is I'm like, okay, what what what does this unlock from a use case perspective that that Excel h hasn't been able to do? and and what are some unfair advantages that people who get on to shortcut early are going to be able unlock. That's what's going through my brain right now. Yeah. Yeah. So, let me tell you a little bit about Microsoft um and what we know about Excel um and then what these unfair advantages are. So, Microsoft Excel specifically is like I would argue like I grew up using Excel. I started my career in finance which is not a coincidence for why we ended up building this. Um in a lot of ways I would say it's like the best design software maybe ever. like it's 40 years of staying power, two billion users, the business like the business world runs on it. Um, but what it's what's what's that what that has accumulated is like a lot of things that you have to satisfy for a lot of different enterprises and for a lot of people who are still built, you know, 20 years ago for their tech stacks. Um, so even co-pilot, which is trying to do what this is doing right now, is forced into helping people use Excel better. it's not forced into like how should Excel really work, right? Um, so we really had the chance to just go from the the ground up and instead of doing a singlestep co-pilot for the things that you only want to do in Excel, we have an endto-end agent that can just do all of your work. Um, and the kind of fun part about it is that like you can import and export Excels directly. So no one would ever even know it's in Shortcut. So, in terms of what people are using it for, they have their standard things they do at work. And honestly, like there's a thousand companies already using this. And I actually think their bosses don't know. I think they have their four or five hours of things they do that have turned into 10 minutes. And ideally, good employees are doing more of them, but maybe a lot of them are just getting them done and enjoying their free time. And I can tell you like what those specific things are, but that's I think what the pattern becomes. Um, so actually by the way here, um, one kind of really key key thing is even if AI becomes perfect, which it's not and I'm not sure it ever will be. It's like an indefinite hill climb. You will have to really really trust its outputs in order to move forward. As in like if you don't know where things come from, they're almost useless. You have to review its work. So here you'll see that it looked it found these 10Ks from Google and it can actually site every single part of the information down to like the exact figure, the exact page of the PDF it came from, the exact year the data came from. Um, so that when things come into your Excel model, you can trace every single bit of it. It's almost like if you use cursor, like code genen was very cool, but until you were able to see the diff, you couldn't quite trust it cuz like some arbitrary line in your code would break. So, one reason we're not building this directly in Excel um or not mainly focused on that is that you can't really manipulate the UI. Like right now, you're seeing that this agent is it sees as an error in the calculations. It found it and it's directly editing it. So, we're changing the spreadsheet and the entire front end um like in real time. I'm happy you said that because it's going it probably going through everyone's mind which is like how can I trust this data? you know, the the stakes are a lot lower with like, hey, write this blog post, then, hey, build a financial model. Yeah. Um, it's just that the finance world until probably right now wasn't ready for this, but this was the same things that we had to ask ourselves in software engineering. It was like, oh well, I'll never use LLM code. Remember when everyone was complaining about hallucinations in December 22? And then we found out that if you can really observe it, if you can apply the diff, of course, humans are still responsible. And if my code doesn't build like I'm the one who gets in trouble. It's not cloud code or cursor. Um so what will inevitably happen whether it's us or someone else who cracks it is in finance, accounting, FPNA, real estate, wherever where like there's these giant people who use Excel, they'll progress to this role of supervisor where they're 10 times faster. And if they're wrong or if there is a bad number in there, of course, it's them that's on the line. But they would take that trade-off because it's easier to supervise work much faster than it is to do the ground work yourself. I mean, ultimately, you're supervising work regardless, right? Like either you're supervising human work or you're super supervising, you know, agentic work. And the bottom line is you you know I guess the question it goes back to like you know are self-driving cars more safe than human human cars. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to bring up. Um the reason that self-driving cars well I mean even within certain cities where their accuracy is really good hasn't haven't been adopted is a little bit of because of this accountability issue where like it seems like humans are actually willing to have more death and chaos as long as they can clearly point to whose fault that is. Um what I really believe to be true though is there's a certain accuracy threshold where if met we will change that um a certain benefit where if we really can can experience this benefit we're willing to think in a new way. Um, but it's not just enough that it's better. It has to be better. It has to be faster. It has to be more observable and traceable cuz you're right, humans are already managing humans. And like that's actually not that easy as I'm sure you know, right? And you know shortcut specifically like how on a scale from like 2005 self-driving car to 2025 self-driving car, like where are we? Yeah, great question. Um, think of it in two dimensions. One is or two almost let's let's do two kinds of use cases. There's a use case of like build something from scratch and let me show you for example um this one right bam. So this was the one I asked it to build something from scratch or more or less I said here is um you know data build me build me summaries dashboards right and in this use case like it just did this in 8 minutes Greg like that's like that would have taken me you know an hour or two and I'm good at Excel. Um, for use cases like this, we're already past the self-driving moment. We're past the the Whimo moment. Now, and I'll continue to answer your question, but I'll show you why it looks like this, which is super cool. Um, this is the observability we're talking about, you can see exactly what figures are hardcoded, which are formula driven, and why, so that you can really review this better. Um, but the real use case, like I was pointing to earlier, is you're going to update not things from scratch, but you're going to update existing models. Now for this use case which I think is 90% of real Excel work where like the you know billions of dollars are I'd say we are at like the Tesla self-driving right now as in like if you're in the know if you're willing to adopt Frontier Tech it's very exciting and actually useful in your workflow but humans are still by and large doing the manual driving themselves. I I like to think of it as we're probably heading for like an August 2024 moment, which is when Karpathy tweeted about cursor and it went like 20x. I think the question is is are we like is it August now or is it May? But but there's a very clear line that we can future predict towards that looks like we know what to solve and that it is solvable. So it's it is as you can imagine super exciting for us and it's also very clear that use you know a product like this should exist right like using plain English to you know we've had vibe coding we've had vibe marketing we haven't had vibe excel yet um but I think you know that this idea around um you know taking your thoughts and and bu and building you know in this case It's not code but and you know it's kind of it's kind of quasi code in some ways right. Yeah. I know of course um I wish I can show you the logs cuz it's of course code. Um everything is code. Right. Right. And everything will be code. Um and I think all code will be generated like dynamically. Um but the re the thing you're kind of getting to is what I've always thought was you know maybe one of my smart ideas but you know it's not mine exclusively is the best ideas are not definitionally contrarian as in like I didn't have to think of something that you didn't believe and then make it true. I just think the best ideas are really obvious in hindsight and I think the best predictor of what that is is if you can release something do people say I can't believe this didn't exist already right um so when people see this I think that's the reason that the initial reception has been so strong it's just why hasn't this existed like there has to be some explanation and I'll tell you what it is we're a research lab with 20 people that are all you know from MIT Stanford great researchers but if it wasn't for my background in finance, we wouldn't have done this. And I just don't think that there are co-founders at, you know, the 10 or so frontier research companies in the world that care at all about finance. No, no researchers really spending material time in Excel at all. Um, they are building coding agents because that's what they love, right? So, it it it took someone of a little bit of a different background to make it happen. Um, and now I think the world knows how important it is because of the because of the initial reception and I'm sure everyone's sprinting towards it. Yeah, I mean that's why that's why I reached out because I I had this in my brain that I wanted this. Um and so it's it's cool to see it working where So what's happening? What am I seeing on screen right now? Yeah. So this is actually a great one. This is the big hard task, right? Which is update the Microsoft um you know DCF model using Google's new data. Just use the same exact template. Don't change anything except for the data. And what you found is the agent has actually extracted all of this data, has updated the historical data, the drivers and the assumptions, is looking at the tax rate and it's actually kind of finding errors as it goes and it's like that actually doesn't really quite check out. I think capex is too high, right? Or here's an example. There seems to be an income calculation error. Let me correct the issue. I see the issue. It's that in the data sheet it has the wrong references and it's always finding its own mistakes and just chugging along. So you're seeing it actually do the kind of work that a human would have to do. And it's about like see I see the issue there's a dependency and it's causing a circular reference. One of the hardest problems in Excel you have like these things that are codependent on each other. Um and it found the circular reference and the exact formula that it was referencing. Uh which isn't a hard formula like I don't know if you ever use like sums in Excel but it found it and it found it and it fixed the error. So, that error is gone and now it found that there's a couple ref errors um in this SGNA and it's correcting those two. Yep. And now it's that's correct and there's still some remaining ones. Um and then Greg, what I'd also like to do is like if there's anything you want to try, like go push it. Go let's go break this thing, you know? I mean, I'll tell you one thing that's been on my mind recently. Mhm. So um we we've got an agency and a design agency for for AI companies called LCA. And one of the things that um you know if you write a if you run a tight agency you you need to have utilization rates that are you need to have people basically on on uh files like they need to be utilized in order and because the big mistake you know the big problem that a lot of agencies have is at the end of the year they're making 5% IBIDA 3% EBIDA 7% IBIDA like they're very hard businesses to run because you people aren't utilized. So, I wonder if there's a way to create some sort of like profitability analysis around um you know, agency utilization rates based on like different teams and stuff like that. Like ultimately my dream, Nico, is to look at a spreadsheet where it says like this is how uh utilized this team is. This is how utilized that team is. This is how much revenue they're bringing in. This is how profitable they are. Just like a bird's eye view of um utilization and profitability. You can tell uh my spelling has deteriorated ever since using a um so let's go ask let's ask shortcut for that. Um, yeah, it'll ask clarifying questions and then we will see what we can do about it. Okay, cool. I mean, I would if this works like this is a good test. This is a good test. Um, I had done something similar where I asked it like, "Hey, we're going to do like some kind of launch soon. I'm looking for like a bunch of the most in distribution best launch partners that I can like meet with, talk to." And I had it find that across every single platform and then it get like their posting schedule, why it's a good fit, how much they expect to cost. Even I got the people's emails. So it's kind of a similar kind of task like that. Um so you tell me this is your dream task, right? Do you do you want this multiple sheets, custom? Uh single sheet. Single sheet. Yeah. What time period should the utilization analyst cover? Monthly. Let's do monthly key metrics. Yeah. Utilization percentage revenue. That's great. Cool. All of them. Do you want a dashboard to visualize the data? Yeah. Why not? Yeah, you can make it hard. Yeah, let's just make it hard. Let's see if we can break it. There's now like what kind of data it's going to assume to make dummy data, I suppose. Do you want me to like get weird data from the web? Like what what do you want to do? Is there a way to benchmark our utilization rates versus, you know, standard design agency uh utilization rates? Like I want to know if we're ahead of the pack or behind. Maybe I'm making this way too complicated for you. No, no, no. Let's do it, man. Um, can you benchmark exist against standard agencies? These are which one specifically? Design design agencies. Yeah. Right. Um, design agencies. And then for our data, do you want me to like say like use Greg Eisenberg's company? Like see what you can find. Yeah. I mean, you can you can go lay checkout. The website's late checkout. Agency. Go to late checkout. That's my company. Sure. Um, yeah. So, I mean, it's pretty vague. Let's see if we can let's see if we can start marching towards your dream. That's all I ask because I I'm I feel like I bug the finance people and like on my team and they they don't want to hear from me like add this column here and do this there. And I also think that a lot of people listening are like soloreneurs or small teams startups who don't have finance teams. Right. Right. Right. Right. So this is this your finance team in a box type thing. Yeah. I mean that's why I used that first prompt here which was like I have my expenses. Let me walk you through the the actual answer here. Yeah. Um I don't have a finance team, right? I'm one person out of 20 and I'm the only businessoriented person and I still spend most of my time coding. Uh so I had the expenses here. I actually need to build a P&L. Um, so pull this up. And in fact, actually, there are some errors here which I'm not used to seeing, but let's go into Y. Um, historical P&L projections. Oh, interesting. So, it projected the revenue out for the fiscal years. Um, you know, according to where these sources of revenue were in the expenses, and it made a dashboard here. So, some bizarre formatting choices quite honestly. Um but you'll see it's looking like it has revenue, it has and these are all formula driven so you can see exactly like where they come from. Um some of the ones are going to be more assumptions. Um you see total revenue, gross profit, operating margin and so on. Uh even charts it and it took you know my data and built me you know a forward-looking P&L, right? Crazy. Um, I think we're probably, you know, for these net news, it's like having your own mini finance team because you you don't want to do this from scratch, but you probably would want to just do your last tweaks at the end. Yeah, exactly. Um, so here actually we're going. You ready? Yeah. Uh, let's see. Sheet one exists. It's going to create an a profitability analysis for late checkout agency. Well, interesting. By the way, Greg, I've never seen uh utilization like sheet like this. So, tell me tell me what you tell me your thoughts as you're seeing it. So, I mean, you know, going left to right. So, I obviously I love the, you know, breakdown of employee and level. Like that's we level people and, you know, higher levels obviously get paid more and stuff like that. So, I I love that. Um, available hours by month. It's interesting to see it like that, but that's not exactly how I envisioned it. Like to me, I'm kind of like a percentage guy. Like, do you have does Jane have 10% next month? Okay, let's go, you know, maybe let's not put her on a project because we don't want to be at 100%. You know, we want people to like, right, that's too much, right? Um, but if someone has if Jane has 70% availability, then she's kind of just sitting sitting around, right? Sitting around. Yeah. Well, let's see. I think my my guess is it will do some percentages as well. Um, in fact, let's go through the task list because it's going to be pretty thorough. It has 13 tasks it wants to get done as a part of this. Yeah, it's going to create an analysis sheet to calculate Yeah, look to calculate utilization percentages by employee and team. Okay. Um, and revenue and cost as well. So let's let's see how this does for you. Meanwhile, let's check on Microsoft. Boom. So this is the Microsoft file that it updated and changed to Google. Yeah. Um you can see which files I mean which for which are hardcoded which are formulas. Let's just go bit by bit. Right. So it made these new charts. This is for Google. It changed the name from alpha from Microsoft to Google and it has new results. Right. Um this is like a kind of a standard P&L. I'll change the view so it doesn't look like it's in the review state. P&L. So, so this formula didn't actually check out. We'll we can actually just ask it to fix it, but I'll go back. Assumptions. These are like the growth rates for these are the actually this is cool. This these are the growth rates for um the assumptions for Google Alphabet, which are like kind of hard to guess. Why would you assume that YouTube's going to grow at this rate? Cloud's going to grow at this rate, right? Um, so if you turn this on, you can see that these are hardcoded and where they come from. Like these these assumptions are actually coming from the 10K. And if you actually click into it, like why is this value this, right? This is something you can't do in Excel. You can open this up and it's like, hey, here's what the R&D is costing and here is the part of the PDF that's telling you where this freaking thing came from. It's not just completely made out of the blue, right? So any anything hardcoded, you can find that for. And then we'll go back. Let's go drivers. So, a couple formula errors, which is why I'm saying I think editing existing templates is kind of like sometimes your Tesla makes a turn and you're a little suspicious about it, you know. Um, that's where we're trying to cross that that that that line um right now. Um, so yeah, typically what I would do is highlight this. You can select the the range that you want to make specific edits to. Be like, hey, fix these formula errors, please. That's it. like you don't you don't give any more context to that. You just say like fix this. Um yeah, let's see. Um so that's like a cool I don't know like again command K would be like this this feature in cursor in which you would like highlight a range and like you know make a specific targeted edit. What it will do is it will restrict the edit space. So it only changes those but it's pretty bright about like let me look everywhere for the necessary context to update this. Okay, cool. And then let's go back to your task. All right. So, you know, I have to admit I did not realize that building utilization matrix is as complicated as a as an LBO model. So, let's see. Uh, yeah, it's starting to add um information to the sheet. Let's see. Boom. Okay. Okay. Yes. This is exactly the type of vibe I had in my mind. Really? Yeah. Like with the utilization rate, how many available hours cuz Yeah. No, this is this is this is what I wanted. Something like this. Awesome. Yeah. And then what you would probably do like as a user is you would be like this was good, but I actually wanted a little different. Let's go like change it, you know? And you might do it cuz like well I mean you're not as like a hardcore Excel user, you can do it yourself to some extent if you think that's faster. But if you're like actually I need these values in red. I like actually want to use my real data so use this. Um you'll just like go for that second version. You know, I mean I shouldn't say it's like perfect. Like I now I'm looking at I'm like, "Okay, I would change this." But um Well, what would you change in specific? Yeah. Well, I think like for me, you know, I would want if if someone's average utilization rate, let's say, is above 70%. Like, make it red. Like that's scary, right? Burn burnout mode. If if someone's utilization rate is under 60%, make it um green, maybe. You're such a You're such a nice manager. You don't want your people working so hard, huh? Well, I've owned agencies long enough to know that you that's not the way to build a sustainable Yeah. business. Yeah. Um well, let's actually look at the um at the tasks here. Usually, so this is what you're talking about, Greg. In Excel, there's a thing called conditional formatting, which would be like based on this condition, make certain thing look like this. Now, while we weren't we didn't say this in the prompt, so it's I'm not sure exactly what it will choose to do. Um, but my guess is it will decide like you know certain numbers if they're too high will be in red or too low they will be in red. Okay. What about automation? Like how does how do you how can you automate like I I don't want to go into this and I'm not saying we're doing this today but right um like I don't want to go in this every day and update how many hours. Like is there a world where there's like you can you can program this to automate similar to how like the gum loops and the Lindian AIs in the world have automated marketing? Yeah. Yeah. Uh it's a great question. Um we don't have at this point like a super strong integrations pipeline. Um but what you're asking for is kind of like the essential thing we're getting into now, which is you will want to automate automatically extractions from QuickBooks. If you're in law, it's like they want to updates from Carta. If they're in like every industry has their thing, which is part of the challenge if you're going to do Excel, like for a research lab, that's like very niche and specific. Yeah. But is product it's actually almost too broad, right? Um it's like you mean two billion people, right? Um so yeah, currently what you will have to do is actually get your export and attach it and then it will do that, but it won't autosync for you. So you're you're you're kind of in charge of at least supplying the data for now. Currently now we we have this dashboard. It has utilization by departments, revenue and profit by department. It's actually looking for. So this is kind of cool. There's like a near deep research level quality of of web of web search here. So you see looking you know based on the web research there's utilization for certain benchmarks here. Principles average this project managers this. This looks to be this could be a little out of distribution. This is for certain kinds of companies. Let's see. and it has all of these sites that it's referencing and now so adding industry benchmarks and strategic recommendations based on the analysis compared to your data. Yeah. So what you'll get at most which actually makes Excel wonderful is that you have formulas at least so like you can see that like this like you know I'm good at Excel but this would take me a while to write. um you can at least see that it's taking an average of this stuff right so like there's some degree of like traceability but it's not like cited right like it's not that the job of observing in Excel is is unfortunately today pretty brutal for that reason totally also like to you there's a little bit of context to Excel like when you see a formula but to like a simpleton like me who doesn't know Excel that well I'm kind of like what is happening Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think like look at this formula I this is above my Excel mastery now too, right? This is a an average if certain conditions are met divided by an average like other conditions. Um part of the really cool thing is you no longer will have to ever know this again. Like you will just be able to as an Excel neopight just say like listen I just need this thing. use Excel formulas because my boss is gonna look at it eventually or whoever, but you will no longer have to speak in this language. Just like I code in like Rust sometimes and I really don't know Rust, but like I know enough of the patterns and I trust AI selectively enough to to do it. Yeah. Um and then I'll go over one more. So I just it wrapped up. I'm curious. This is your dream, right? Um my dream. It's a high bar, but what what do we think? I'm going to I'll I won't show the review changes now. Yeah, but we have, you know, you guide me. What do you want to look at? I mean, I'm looking from top to bottom. So, um I love the I mean the I love how like at the top there's like the KPIs cuz like as a founder I just want to know like okay, what is happening here? Are we on target? Are we you know behind? I probably in the future would want to actually have like a I guess it's called conditional or conditional statement or whatever. like okay we're behind schedule here we're behind target like um and then eventually if you had an integration I would be like you know if behind target then post to Slack right saying you know to our uh finance to our sales team that like we need more leads to come in for example yeah uh yeah I mean totally um and we'll flip it through it go into the analysis all right so we have conditional formatting on your um on your hypothetical employees here. Um it looks like it chose you know 70s and orange. So it it's more it's more brutal of a manager than you are. It it basically assumed if you are high if you're high utilization that's green. That's the best case. Um below 78 painted as red here. Um did department summaries and then again here was the original data. Um and sort of like the initial drivers. I mean, dude, this is insane. I know you're probably numb to this, but this is insane. Yeah, I'm numb to it. Actually, to be honest, I'm like a little bothered that the earlier live demo was like weaker than it usually is. This is crazy. Like, we took an idea that has been in my head for a while and we created that in a few minutes and it looks great and it's colorcoded and it it's simple and it's clean. Yeah, I appreciate it. Um, what we can do for you also is like check it. So, you can just like create a file and I'll call it Greg's dream. Create a share link. Um, and now you can actually take this and you can not just see the file, but you can see like the entire history. You can just edit it from there on. Um, and then the other thing you can do is like export it. So, you know, Greg, and now it's in my documents and like you would never know again that it was in shortcut. Um before we wrap up, I I want to ask you know why why should someone try shortcut? Should you know should they wait or should they try now? Like you know why why should any founder or you know be be using this product right now? Yeah. Um shortcut is for the billions of people who use Excel. Um among them there's like two types. The people who are really good at Excel and use it a lot. they should use it because it takes hours of work and makes it truly like I showed here, you know, 10 15 minutes. Then there's the people who are more like yourself who have to use Excel but you're not Excel experts. It makes you an instant Excel expert, right? You could now create this um and you will speak to it in just plain English. And not only is it faster, but it's now also better than you at Excel. And is it is it live? Like I mean by the time this comes out, is it will it be live? By the time this is out, it will be live. Yes. Okay, cool. Okay. And is it from a pricing perspective? Like what does it cost? Yeah, right now we're charging $40 a month for the pro plan and 200 for the max plan. Uh max plan actually, which I haven't shared, contains the analyst beta. So the analyst beta, you can actually just directly email it and say, "Hey, I need 10 different things at once and it's 10x parallel." So now it's not just 10 times faster than your analyst, but you can have 10 of them at a time. Um, which I think for enterprises has been like the big feedback is they just want to hire this thing already. Um, so that's so that's that's where that that's where the pricing is is a little different there. Cool. Yeah, I think that's it's probably where a lot I mean that's that's where a lot of AI startups are going. like they have like kind of a more entry level and then they have like a few hundred a month analyst type of a product. Yeah. Um it's a fun time to be building an AI but you have to be you know the the ground truth changes a lot and that will change the pricing of course that like this is very token hungry. You watched how many times I had to correct itself. Yeah. Um, but as these costs fall, so does our our pricing strategy. And and just to summarize, like if people want to get the most out of Shortcut, they want to be an instant Excel, super Excel person, like what do you recommend to them to to get the most out of the product? Um, immediately just go to trash.ai. There's no other pages. It just loads it up. And try a prompt for free. Find out how it would be valuable to you. Um, and again, um, do the hardest thing and prove to yourself that like it can take just about anything if you're specific enough in your prompt. Cool. Nico, thanks for showing it showing it off. I appreciate you. Yeah, I know. My pleasure, Greg. Later. See you. Bye.