Mode is the product that invented the modern data workspace. Before Mode, the analyst's job was a Frankenstein workflow of desktop SQL clients, Excel, and email. After Mode, it was a URL. Every collaborative data notebook that has appeared since — Hex, Deepnote, Count, Observable, Hex Magic — owes its existence to the category Mode created in 2013.

In 2023, Mode was acquired by ThoughtSpot for a reported ~$200 million, ending its run as an independent company. The product is still actively used at thousands of companies, but its strategic role has shifted from "category-defining standalone" to "the analyst-facing front end of ThoughtSpot's broader analytics platform."

What It Actually Is

Mode is a web-based environment that combines a SQL editor (with autocomplete and a schema browser for the connected warehouse), a Python or R notebook (running on top of the SQL result), a chart builder, and a "Reports" layer that turns the whole thing into a polished, shareable web page. The flow is: write a query, get a result, optionally manipulate it in Python, build a few charts, drag them onto a report canvas, hit publish, send the URL to your boss.

Two specific design choices defined Mode and shaped the entire category:

1. SQL is the first-class citizen. Mode was built for SQL analysts, not data scientists. The SQL editor was good. The schema browser was good. The result grids felt fast. Python existed, but it sat on top of the SQL result — it was the secondary tool. This was the right call in 2014, when the typical analytics team was a few SQL-fluent humans serving a fast-growing company. It was the wrong call in 2020, when ML-curious analysts wanted Python to be a first-class environment, not a tab.

2. Reports as the canonical artifact. Mode's "Report" was essentially a word-processed analysis: title, narrative, charts, embedded code, all at one URL. This was a genuinely novel idea in 2013. It's so common now that we forget anyone had to invent it.

The Origin Story

Mode was founded in 2013 by Derek Steer (ex-Facebook data team), Benn Stancil (now famous for benn.substack, the most-read newsletter in the data world), Josh Ferguson, and Handel Jones. The founding observation was simple: every fast-growing tech company in San Francisco had a data team that lived in some combination of SQL Workbench, Excel, and email, and it was crazy that there was no purpose-built tool for the work. Mode set out to be that tool.

For most of the mid-2010s, Mode was the default. Stripe used Mode. Lyft used Mode. Most YC-era startups used Mode. The product was good and the alternative — desktop clients plus email — was terrible. Mode raised $73 million across multiple rounds (Foundation Capital, Valor, H.I.G., Accel, others) and built one of the most respected data brands in tech, in part because Benn Stancil's writing made the company synonymous with thoughtful opinions on what a data team should look like.

What Went Wrong (or, How Hex Won)

By the early 2020s, Mode had a problem: the world had moved from "SQL with a Python tab" to "Python and SQL as equal citizens, in a reactive notebook, with a polished app builder on top." Hex was built around exactly that paradigm. Mode tried to catch up — they shipped Helix (an in-memory engine), they invested in Python notebooks, they built dashboards — but the product never quite shed its identity as the SQL-first tool from the early 2010s.

The reactivity gap was particularly painful. Mode notebooks ran cells in linear order, and analysts who switched to Hex never went back. By 2022, the new-team default had clearly flipped to Hex. Mode's growth slowed. The ThoughtSpot acquisition in 2023 was the rational outcome: Mode had brand, distribution, and a great team, but no path to independent dominance in a market where Hex had taken the technical lead.

Why It Still Matters

Despite losing the standalone race, Mode is still in active use at thousands of companies, and it remains a reasonable choice if:

• You're already on ThoughtSpot and want a tightly integrated analyst workspace.
• You have a long history of Mode reports as institutional knowledge that you don't want to migrate.
• Your team is heavily SQL-skewed and doesn't need reactive Python.
• You value the maturity and stability of a 12+ year-old product over the bleeding edge.

Mode also kept some specific advantages: its SQL editor is genuinely excellent, its dashboards are tighter and more "BI-like" than Hex's apps, and the ThoughtSpot integration brings a real natural-language search layer to the front end.

The Opinionated Take

Mode is the cautionary tale of being right too early. The category Mode invented turned out to be one of the most important in modern data, worth billions in aggregate. Mode itself captured a meaningful slice but was overtaken by a competitor that rebuilt the same category with a better technical foundation a decade later. The lesson, depending on your taste: either "first mover wins" is mostly a myth, or "the second mover wins by learning from the first." Probably both.

The other lesson: in a category defined by analyst love, technical purity matters. Hex's reactive execution model was not a marketing feature — it was a structural improvement that analysts could feel every time they used the product. That kind of advantage compounds.

Where Mode Fits in the Stack

Mode sits between the warehouse and the human consumer, exactly where Hex sits. It connects to Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, Postgres, and most major OLTP and OLAP databases. With the ThoughtSpot acquisition, it's now part of a broader analytics platform that includes ThoughtSpot's natural-language search and embedded analytics products.