S8 Bonus: From Facebook and Pinterest Data Infrastructure to Building the Canva for Data, with Shawn Cao of Columns

Shawn Cao lives in Kirkland, just outside of Seattle. He immigrated to the US, and is married with 4 kids. He loves to hike and play soccer with his children, and even though Seattle can be rainy and cloudy for half the year, he admits that the summers are fantastic for being outside. He also admits he stops by Starbucks occasionally, but couldn't confirm if it tastes better at the home store in Seattle.

Shawn noticed, through his time at larger companies like Pinterest and Microsoft, that the path to get data insights and analytics leans heavily on engineering, and takes a long time. He thought, there must be a way to make an easy, quick tool to enable people outside of engineering to do this themselves. So he built the Canva for Data.

This is the creation story of Columns.