5 ms·

Grammarly acquires Coda

130 points by Olphs 2y ago

vouaobrasil 2y ago
I wish mergers were not possible. I feel like the merger/acquisition thing has gone way to far to make behemonth corporations that help no one but the rich.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  ECONOMIES OF SCALE!!! SYNERGY!!! Just going through one right now; can't tell if the sickly sweet, positive executive speak is an act or they honestly believe it.
  - moregrist 2y ago
    I have heard, albeit third hand or so, that M&A people (lawyers, investment bankers, and probably a fair percentage of C-suite execs) are fairly cynical about most mergers: synergies are often overstated and take years to materialize if they ever do. But those sweet M&A fees and that sweet M&A bonus money is definitely real.
- lupire 2y ago
  Are you similarly opposed to hiring employees? What's the difference?
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Yes, I am opposed to it past a certain point. A company should not be able to grow beyond a certain size.
- bruce511 2y ago
  Anecdotes are not data, and we are (most definitely) not a behemoth, but here is my experience. A) we acquired a small (2 person) company for the people. Basically paid of their debt and they became employees. They gad experience in our domain space. B) we acquired our distributer. We make product (hardware and software) and our (exclusive national) distributer went onto the market. We made an offer. We subsumed twice as many staff, and three times the offices. Fast forward a decade later and the (combined) business has grown a lot, customers are better served, and there is more continuity from "farm to table". So, from my perspective, your proposal to ban acquisitions seems to be painting with a very broad brush. Equally, at the macro scale, there are regulatory controls in place. The recent denial of the T-mobile merger being a case in point.
Olphs 2y ago
Seems interesting For Coda this makes sense to kind of kickstart/boost their AI efforts. But not immediately clear to me why Grammarly is interested in building their own doc builder tool?
- ricardobeat 2y ago
  Looks like a "let's spend our cash/equity on something good while we still exist" kind of situation.
lewisjoe 2y ago
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.
- dr_kiszonka 2y ago
  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.
  - jerrygoyal 2y ago
    > I think a browser extension for gmail should be relatively easy. Hold your beer, I built that https://chatgptwriter.ai https://chatgptwriter.ai
    - dr_kiszonka 2y ago
      Haha nicely done! However, it is more expensive than Grammarly's annual plan and there is no Office app. I do like the different models, though, and it looks very polished. Have you considered letting users add their own "writing tones"? I have a few Custom GPTs for different types of recipients. Perhaps your users would like such a feature.
      - jerrygoyal 2y ago
        > Have you considered letting users add their own "writing tones"? Even better, I recently implemented the Prompt Template feature. You can create as many prompt templates as you like and insert them with one click. It's a recent feature, so the landing page is not updated, but you can try it for free (without adding a credit card) at https://chatgptwriter.ai/extension https://chatgptwriter.ai/extension.
janalsncm 2y ago
> And we also discussed the leadership structure, and agreed that I would lead the joint company as CEO. Pretty interesting twist. It’s almost as if Coda acquired Grammarly.
- avree 2y ago
  Two failing companies joining forces to fail together, a tale as old as time.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Dinosaurs mating!
  - sib 2y ago
    "Two turkeys rarely give birth to an eagle"
bitpush 2y ago
This sounds like a VC forced marriage. I'm like 90% sure that Coda and Grammarly are both under the same VC umbrella.
- cubecul 2y ago
  General Catalyst
  - layer8 2y ago
    …is the name of the VC company. Just for clarity.
- wslh 2y ago
  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.".
  - thimabi 2y ago
    Maybe that passage itself was rewritten by an AI :)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - notatoad 2y ago
    not that strange, it's just corporate-speak. that's what all the people writing blog posts on linkedin glorifying their 80-hour weeks sound like.
    - wslh 2y ago
      I have some experience in writing, reading, and editing. While there isn't a single, definitive writing style, it's common to use positive, concise corporate-speak in specific places. However, this piece employs it repeatedly, as seen in phrases like: - "Together, we will build the AI-native suite of the future" - "This represents an opportunity for dramatic acceleration of the Coda product and our mission" - "We plan to weave the best of Coda and Grammarly together. It will combine your company knowledge, generative AI chat features, a full productivity suite, and hundreds of agents to help you work smarter" - "We aim to redefine productivity for the AI era"
benatkin 2y ago
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/ https://panic.com/coda/
- Angostura 2y ago
  Awww. They've gone subscription model - because of course they have.
  - rubslopes 2y ago
    No mention of AI, though!
  - mobiledev2014 2y ago
    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
    - chipotle_coyote 2y ago
      Right. It's closer to Jetbrains' model for their IDE, although arguably better. IIRC if you stop paying Jetbrains an annual license, the license "falls back" to the version the IDE was at when the license started 12 months ago; if you stop paying Panic, the Nova license remains good for the major version of Nova you have when the license ended. (e.g., if you bought a license when Nova 10.0 was current and the license "expired" when Nova 11.1 was the current version, you don't have to go back to Nova 10; you can keep using Nova 11 and keep getting updates until Nova 12 is released.)
dietzchi 2y ago
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.
- ryanar 2y ago
  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.
  - dgreensp 2y ago
    I had that impression when I joined Coda; not so much by the time I left.
- jjcm 2y ago
  Where are you seeing the 150M number from?
  - dietzchi 2y ago
    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
a9a 2y ago
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.
- mobiledev2014 2y ago
  Coda is torture to use. Heard great things about Notion. I doubt they are in the same UX ballpark
- aabhay 2y ago
  Would create too much frenemy energy with microsoft mothership
aabhay 2y ago
> 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.
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  Its what happens when you get AI to write your press release.
- zusammen 2y ago
  This is how the startup life is sold to youngsters—million-dollar conversations just happen—and it’s amusing to see the myth is still alive.
  - g33ky 2y ago
    Sometimes they do. >> 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-zuckerberg https://www.techemails.com/p/instagram-cofounder-on-mark-zuc... [1] https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/C_od8rsvuiO https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/C_od8rsvuiO
profsummergig 2y ago
Last month most of my YouTube ads have been Grammarly. Don't know how they can afford such blanket coverage. I've never used it.
- morkalork 2y ago
  Hah, someone said the exact same thing about Chegg when they're in the same spot as being decimated by chatgpt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103764
antics 2y ago
I think the title should be changed, Coda acquired Grammarly. No?
- deburo 2y ago
  See here: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-acquires-coda/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-acquires-co... >I am excited to share today that Grammarly agrees to acquire Coda
solarkraft 2y ago
Grammarly may be a fine tool, but I have hated it ever since their incredibly insulting “we think you’re too stupid to differentiate ‘you’ and ‘you\’re’” ad campaign. Whatever cool things Grammarly may do, the brand won’t work for me.

130 points by Olphs 2y ago

I wish mergers were not possible. I feel like the merger/acquisition thing has gone way to far to make behemonth corporations that help no one but the rich.

skeeter2020 2y ago
ECONOMIES OF SCALE!!! SYNERGY!!! Just going through one right now; can't tell if the sickly sweet, positive executive speak is an act or they honestly believe it.
- moregrist 2y ago
  I have heard, albeit third hand or so, that M&A people (lawyers, investment bankers, and probably a fair percentage of C-suite execs) are fairly cynical about most mergers: synergies are often overstated and take years to materialize if they ever do. But those sweet M&A fees and that sweet M&A bonus money is definitely real.
lupire 2y ago
Are you similarly opposed to hiring employees? What's the difference?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Yes, I am opposed to it past a certain point. A company should not be able to grow beyond a certain size.
bruce511 2y ago
Anecdotes are not data, and we are (most definitely) not a behemoth, but here is my experience. A) we acquired a small (2 person) company for the people. Basically paid of their debt and they became employees. They gad experience in our domain space. B) we acquired our distributer. We make product (hardware and software) and our (exclusive national) distributer went onto the market. We made an offer. We subsumed twice as many staff, and three times the offices. Fast forward a decade later and the (combined) business has grown a lot, customers are better served, and there is more continuity from "farm to table". So, from my perspective, your proposal to ban acquisitions seems to be painting with a very broad brush. Equally, at the macro scale, there are regulatory controls in place. The recent denial of the T-mobile merger being a case in point.

Olphs 2y ago

Seems interesting For Coda this makes sense to kind of kickstart/boost their AI efforts. But not immediately clear to me why Grammarly is interested in building their own doc builder tool?

ricardobeat 2y ago
Looks like a "let's spend our cash/equity on something good while we still exist" kind of situation.

lewisjoe 2y ago

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.

dr_kiszonka 2y ago
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.
- jerrygoyal 2y ago
  > I think a browser extension for gmail should be relatively easy. Hold your beer, I built that https://chatgptwriter.ai https://chatgptwriter.ai
  - dr_kiszonka 2y ago
    Haha nicely done! However, it is more expensive than Grammarly's annual plan and there is no Office app. I do like the different models, though, and it looks very polished. Have you considered letting users add their own "writing tones"? I have a few Custom GPTs for different types of recipients. Perhaps your users would like such a feature.
    - jerrygoyal 2y ago
      > Have you considered letting users add their own "writing tones"? Even better, I recently implemented the Prompt Template feature. You can create as many prompt templates as you like and insert them with one click. It's a recent feature, so the landing page is not updated, but you can try it for free (without adding a credit card) at https://chatgptwriter.ai/extension https://chatgptwriter.ai/extension.

janalsncm 2y ago

> And we also discussed the leadership structure, and agreed that I would lead the joint company as CEO. Pretty interesting twist. It’s almost as if Coda acquired Grammarly.

avree 2y ago
Two failing companies joining forces to fail together, a tale as old as time.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Dinosaurs mating!
- sib 2y ago
  "Two turkeys rarely give birth to an eagle"

bitpush 2y ago

This sounds like a VC forced marriage. I'm like 90% sure that Coda and Grammarly are both under the same VC umbrella.

cubecul 2y ago
General Catalyst
- layer8 2y ago
  …is the name of the VC company. Just for clarity.
wslh 2y ago
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.".
- thimabi 2y ago
  Maybe that passage itself was rewritten by an AI :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- notatoad 2y ago
  not that strange, it's just corporate-speak. that's what all the people writing blog posts on linkedin glorifying their 80-hour weeks sound like.
  - wslh 2y ago
    I have some experience in writing, reading, and editing. While there isn't a single, definitive writing style, it's common to use positive, concise corporate-speak in specific places. However, this piece employs it repeatedly, as seen in phrases like: - "Together, we will build the AI-native suite of the future" - "This represents an opportunity for dramatic acceleration of the Coda product and our mission" - "We plan to weave the best of Coda and Grammarly together. It will combine your company knowledge, generative AI chat features, a full productivity suite, and hundreds of agents to help you work smarter" - "We aim to redefine productivity for the AI era"

benatkin 2y ago

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/ https://panic.com/coda/

Angostura 2y ago
Awww. They've gone subscription model - because of course they have.
- rubslopes 2y ago
  No mention of AI, though!
- mobiledev2014 2y ago
  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
  - chipotle_coyote 2y ago
    Right. It's closer to Jetbrains' model for their IDE, although arguably better. IIRC if you stop paying Jetbrains an annual license, the license "falls back" to the version the IDE was at when the license started 12 months ago; if you stop paying Panic, the Nova license remains good for the major version of Nova you have when the license ended. (e.g., if you bought a license when Nova 10.0 was current and the license "expired" when Nova 11.1 was the current version, you don't have to go back to Nova 10; you can keep using Nova 11 and keep getting updates until Nova 12 is released.)

dietzchi 2y ago

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.

ryanar 2y ago
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.
- dgreensp 2y ago
  I had that impression when I joined Coda; not so much by the time I left.
jjcm 2y ago
Where are you seeing the 150M number from?
- dietzchi 2y ago
  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

a9a 2y ago

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.

mobiledev2014 2y ago
Coda is torture to use. Heard great things about Notion. I doubt they are in the same UX ballpark
aabhay 2y ago
Would create too much frenemy energy with microsoft mothership

aabhay 2y ago

> 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.

jay_kyburz 2y ago
Its what happens when you get AI to write your press release.
zusammen 2y ago
This is how the startup life is sold to youngsters—million-dollar conversations just happen—and it’s amusing to see the myth is still alive.
- g33ky 2y ago
  Sometimes they do. >> 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-zuckerberg https://www.techemails.com/p/instagram-cofounder-on-mark-zuc... [1] https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/C_od8rsvuiO https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/C_od8rsvuiO

profsummergig 2y ago

Last month most of my YouTube ads have been Grammarly. Don't know how they can afford such blanket coverage. I've never used it.

morkalork 2y ago
Hah, someone said the exact same thing about Chegg when they're in the same spot as being decimated by chatgpt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42103764

antics 2y ago

I think the title should be changed, Coda acquired Grammarly. No?

deburo 2y ago
See here: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-acquires-coda/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-acquires-co... >I am excited to share today that Grammarly agrees to acquire Coda

solarkraft 2y ago

Grammarly may be a fine tool, but I have hated it ever since their incredibly insulting “we think you’re too stupid to differentiate ‘you’ and ‘you\’re’” ad campaign. Whatever cool things Grammarly may do, the brand won’t work for me.