Spreadsheets to Vibe Coding: How History Rhymes
The $3.5 billion Lotus exit in 1995 was the software industry's largest up to that point
In 1978, Dan Bricklin sat in a Harvard Business School classroom, staring at a chalkboard crammed with numbers. When professors changed a single assumption, students scrambled to recalculate everything by hand. It was error-prone and slow. Bricklin dreamed of a “word processor for numbers,” a tool that would let anyone model ideas and instantly see results. VisiCalc was born; soon after, Mitch Kapor steered Lotus 1-2-3 to become a household name, and spreadsheets changed number crunching for non-coders forever.
Today, we’re watching history repeat. The revolution isn’t about numbers anymore. It’s about code.
The First Wave: Spreadsheets for All
Before the spreadsheet, efficient computation was reserved for coders and technical users of computers. VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 broke down the barriers, letting accountants, marketers, and teachers create their own spreadsheets with no coding required. Sales boomed, venture capitalists saw wild returns, and IBM’s $3.5 billion Lotus buyout redefined what software could mean for Wall Street.
But the real impact was outside boardrooms: teaching assistants tracked grades, theaters optimized showtimes, families managed budgets, the spreadsheet software application still to this day empowers untrained users wield computational power. In finance, spreadsheet is still a highly desirable skill with all macros and integrations extending the power through web data.
The Vibe Coding Era
Jump to 2025. AI is the multiplier, ”vibe coding” is a new catchphrase coined by Andrej Karpathy, a deep learning pioneer and highly respected AI practitioner. He put forward a bold claim: software is now written in English. Want an app? Describe it. See an error? Paste it in, AI will fix it. No classes, no syntax, no gatekeepers.
Both moments, spreadsheet creation and vibe coding’s rise, were fueled by a democratizing vision: put creative control in more hands.
Spreadsheets let domain experts, business leaders, scientists, teachers, become number crunchers.
Vibe coding gives designers, marketers, entrepreneurs the power to build software, unleashing creativity with the friction gone.
Investor Observations from Spreadsheets to understand Vibe Coding
Don’t just build for experts. The product that wins will put usability and creativity over unnecessary complexity.
Be ready for explosive scale. Lotus’ early revenue flew past forecasts. Vibe coding is seeing the same.
Partnerships matter. The right collaborative models are key for sustainability.
Distribution is still king and will outlast the first movers. Spreadsheets are everywhere and the dominant player is not the first mover. Vibe coding will follow a similar path.
This is an educational post about GEX Ventures investments. It is for informational purposes only and may not be relied on as legal, tax, securities or investment advice and does not constitute an offer to buy or sell interest in any products offered by us or others. Email me at mk@gex.vc or leave a comment if you’d like to exchange ideas.