Founder @RowsHQ, husband, father of 3. Interested in spreadsheets, startups, foreign affairs, and learning guitar for dummies.
Joined September 2013
- Tweets 563
- Following 630
- Followers 713
- Likes 1,480
29 Photos and videos
For a mushroom farm it sure doesn't have mush room
596
13,549
186,865
3,638,467
You can work 5 days a week and succeed as a startup.
Mercury has done that from day 0 and we are valued @ $5.2bn 7 years after launch.
I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years and raised 3 kids while doing it.
The point of success is to have a great life not just a startup 😊
May 30
"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".
Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.
- The company works 7 days per week.
- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.
- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.
- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.
Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.
My condensed notes below:
1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:
Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.
2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:
Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.
3. Lead from the Front Lines
You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.
4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning
Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.
5. Lifespan vs. Victories
Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."
6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."
If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.
Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.
199
253
5,640
486,986
Torben Schulz retweeted
May 25
we're hiring AI Educator at @mitte_ai
mitte.ai/careers/role/ZxfzRY…
4
5
21
1,834
Torben Schulz retweeted
Ennio Morricone recorded this masterpiece in Rome. The soundtrack of a lifetime.
For A Few Dollars More | Ennio Morricone | 1965
79
1,410
5,582
212,085
Torben Schulz retweeted
Mar 7
Unreal numbers 👀⚡️
"JPMorgan estimates that, had Germany not phased out nuclear power, the country would have generated 50% less electricity from fossil fuels and 84% less electricity from natural gas in 2024. Electricity prices in Germany would have been around 25% lower, and the country would have imported half as much electricity.."
863
6,099
31,588
3,712,876
Rows will be joining Superhuman!
This is a big moment for us. We started Rows in 2017.
Along the way, more than 2.2 million people used Rows to execute over 17 billion spreadsheet functions, import data from their business tools more than 8.3 billion times, and run over 800 thousand AI Analyst prompts.
Now, we get to take everything we’ve learned and apply it at a much bigger scale. I deeply admire Superhuman’s vision of AI that works everywhere you work, and our team is excited to become part of a team building the future of productivity.
Huge thanks to Shishir and Mark for the trust and partnership along the way. This is a big milestone for us, and I’m genuinely excited about what comes next.
To our customers, thank you for trusting us with your work over the years. We’ve shared more details about this transition, including what it means for you, in the full announcement below.
Thank you to our team especially @torbschulz, our customers, our partners, and our investors for being part of this journey.
Let’s go!!
32
9
155
10,163
Feb 23
Big day:@RowsHQ will be joining Superhuman🚀
Our mission was to make spreadsheets easy, automated & beautiful. Now we’ll bring what we’ve learned to @Superhuman's AI productivity suite.
Excited for what’s next. Deep gratitude to our team, my co-founder @patife, and our customers
3
2
42
3,032
Torben Schulz retweeted
Feb 17
Why don't European companies innovate? It is common to blame expensive energy, high taxes, anti-growth politicians, interest groups, and green regulations.
But California has the same problems, and has created the world's most innovative companies.
Europe's problem is labor law. Compared with America, it's far harder to let workers go when a business doesn't work out.
worksinprogress.co/issue/why…
- It costs a large company roughly four times more to fire a worker in Germany or France than the US.
- German law requires employers to consider age, years of service, family obligations, and disability status when deciding who to lay off. Employees who would be least impacted by losing their job are prioritized for dismissal.
- German employees who take on a caregiving role are fully protected from dismissal for two years from the date they begin caregiving.
- Factory closures in Germany regularly lead to payments of over €200,000 per employee.
- French companies must be prepared to show a court that their financial results are struggling enough to make layoffs necessary.
- To avoid the difficulties of formal dismissals, many European companies entice workers to depart voluntarily, with payouts of up to four years' salary.
Taken together, a German worker is ten times less likely to be fired in a given year than an American worker. This high cost of firing makes failures more expensive. It pushes big European companies away from taking risks and leads them to concentrate on safe, unchanging areas.
Europe has the ingredients needed to succeed. Its citizens are educated and inventive; it has excellent infrastructure and the rule of law; and its culture is not that different from the one it had fifty years ago, when its companies were world-beating. If Europe wants to a Tesla or a Google, it only needs to make it cheaper for companies to fail. My new piece for @WorksInProgMag.
131
260
1,174
427,119
Torben Schulz retweeted
Jan 22
@mitte_ai is looking for Creator in Residence.
If you know anyone who’s obsessed with generative AI and social media, we’d love intros!
2
2
6
424
Torben Schulz retweeted
Jan 21
mitte voice library is live.
the voices introduce themselves better than we ever could.
x.com/mitte_ai/status/201398…
1
3
14
983
Torben Schulz retweeted
Jan 8
Millions of Iranians demanded their freedom tonight. In response, the regime in Iran has cut all lines of communication. It has shut down the Internet. It has cut landlines. It may even attempt to jam satellite signals.
I want to thank the leader of the free world, President Trump, for reiterating his promise to hold the regime to account. It is time for others, including European leaders, to follow his lead, break their silence, and act more decisively in support of the people of Iran.
I call on them to use all technical, financial, and diplomatic resources available to restore communication to the Iranian people so that their voice and their will can be heard and seen. Do not let the voices of my courageous compatriots be silenced.
4,534
22,930
79,945
2,866,720
Torben Schulz retweeted
After 3 years of quiet building, we are finally sharing that this is now tractable via an engineered placenta. But the implications go far beyond.
I hope this gives you a feeling of ‘awe’ that we feel every day doing our life’s work.
Incredibly grateful to the amazing team we have that enabled this and continues to push the frontier!
Jan 7
How do we go from a single cell to a complex organism?
For 50 yrs experimentally meeting the nutritional demands of a growing organism has been a bottleneck in development.
For the first time, we built placental support and predictive tools to make it possible.
Watch ↓
6
9
43
4,700
Torben Schulz retweeted
1 Dec 2025
I'm at SaaStr today and tomorrow.
If you can show me an invoice that we can't parse at Rows, @torbschulz will buy you anything from Pret.
@HarryStebbings and @jasonlk , help me get folks free wraps and chia puddings.
3
2
913
Turn any document into usable data.
Now with an API.
The Rows Vision API handles invoices, contracts, screenshots, you name it.
No setup. No fine-tuning. No training an OCR model.
Just plug it into your workflow, set your extraction instructions, and go.
Available on all plans →
1
3
5
410
Torben Schulz retweeted
14 Nov 2025
Every day, we add more skills to the AI Analyst.
Now, you can use it to do competitor research on Instagram.
Try this prompt:
Create a dashboard with summary stats (post count, avg likes, comments, engagement, top viral posts) and charts using the last 30 days of public Instagram posts from McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC.
2
4
293
14 Nov 2025
🤣😭
13 Nov 2025
Startup using AI to fill out EU grant applications wins innovation award.
The system is eating itself.
@eurofounder are you on the board?
1
60
Torben Schulz retweeted
3 Nov 2025
まじか！！最近使っていなかったけどRowsのCreate a report with AIがめちゃくちゃ便利。ダミーデータもレコード数が1000でも簡単に作ってくれた。これはGeminiではできないのよね。#BreakTheAnalyst
2
3
14
2,568
🚀 Introducing Advanced AI Charts
Your AI Analyst just got a big, visual, upgrade: it can now create advanced visualizations using Python.
Sometimes, a bar or line chart isn’t enough. That’s why we’ve added a whole new layer of chart types to help you see data in the way that makes the most sense.
With AI Charts, you describe what you want to see, and the Analyst builds it for you.
Here are some of the new charts you can create:
🗺 Map → Perfect for sales by country or user distribution.
🔻 Funnel → Great for signups, trials, or sales pipelines.
🟥 Marimekko → Ideal for product line breakdowns.
🌞 Sunburst → Perfect for org structures or customer segments.
📈 Candlestick → Analyze stock prices or financial trends.
🌳 Treemap → Useful for budget allocation or portfolio analysis.
🔷 Hexbin → Great for large datasets where points overlap.
🔥 Heatmap → Perfect for correlations or activity tracking.
💧 Waterfall Chart → Great for financial statements or growth breakdowns.
Available in all plans. Try it today.
2
8
794