We now have the internet, worldwide social networks, an encyclopedia anyone can edit, smartphones and tablets that respond to our touch, search engines that talk to us, smartwatches, digital eyewear, and even self-driving cars. But as the technology driving our world has evolved so enormously over the last 30 years, one thing has largely stayed the same: the computer spreadsheet.

Thanks to Google and others, you can now build an Excel spreadsheet on the net. And some have tried updating the old idea for the new world of smartphones and tablets. But a spreadsheet is still a spreadsheet – a giant grid, an endless array of rows and columns filled with letters and numbers and symbols. Yes, it gives you countless tools for manipulating and reformatting this data, but these are incredibly arcane – relics of a time when computing was the domain of engineers and geeks willing to endlessly tinker with their software. A spreadsheet is software few people can wrap their head around unless they stick to the most basic of tasks.

>Just as other projects are building tools that could turn everyone – including young children – into a computer programmer, Arktos wants to turn everyone into a data scientist

But in Menlo Park, California, not far from Facebook's headquarters, two Stanford dropouts and a former investment banker hope to change this. Under the aegis of a company called Arktos, they're building a spreadsheet that works nothing like a spreadsheet. "We want to create a solution for the part of the population that doesn't have technical ability," says Ari Dyckovsky, who quit Stanford this spring in order to found the company, alongside classmate Ryan Atallah. "We want to make sure that you don't need to understand math or statistics or how to program anything."

They don't want to build another grid. They want to build an app you navigate in more visual and intuitive ways. The ultimate aim is to create a data-juggling tool anyone can use – not just computer geeks and others steeped in the arcana of Excel and its ilk. Just as other projects are building tools that could turn everyone – including young children– into computer programmers, Arktos wants to turn everyone into a data scientist.

The idea began with Dyckovksy and Atallah, both 20, when they sat down this past summer at a coffee shop in Palo Alto. While still in high school, Dyckovsky did quantum entanglement research at the Joint Quantum Institute near Washington, D.C., winning a top prize at the world’s largest high school science research competition, and after studying math and computational science as a freshman at Stanford, he worked as a data scientist – a quantitative researcher, or "quant" – at a new-age stock market outfit called IEX Group. But as he chatted with Atallah, a Colorado native and computer science major who had interned at Facebook that summer, he was captivated by a different subject.

"We went down a black-hole complaining about Excel – how complicated it is and how it has too many functions and how 80 percent of the users only use 20 percent of those functions," says Dyckovsky, who often bumped heads with Excel while at IEX. "After a while, we reached the conclusion that there needed to be a new technology."

The two soon left school to start Arktos, roping in Andrew Vigneault, 24, who brought a college degree to the equation and experience in the world of venture capital and investment banking. According to Dyckovsky, Arktos will build this tool for business use, but much like Box.com and others that seek to "consumerize" the business world, the startup aims to push its software into organizations through individual employees, not through IT departments. As it stands, Arktos is still very much in its infancy – it has an office but no product and no funding – but it does have that most important of things: a unique idea.

At this point, the founders are reluctant to share a mockup of the app they're building, saying that it's the company's most important asset. But the idea is to create a tool that lets you organize data in what are essentially nested images. "Instead of having rows and columns that go on infinitely, we're going to have a hierarchical data structure," Dyckovsky says. As he explains it, you could create an image that represents a group of restaurants. If you click on this icon, you'd then fashion additional images that represent each individual restaurant, and if you click on one of these – say, Philz Coffee – you could create images identifying its attributes: where it's located, what's on the menu, how big the staff is, etc.

Dyckovsky calls this a "data browser." The idea, he says, is to give you "no more than they need to understand to the information at hand." Using this visual arrangement, you also could slice and dice the data, comparing and contrasting and combining disparate data sets. "We want to automate this process." This isn't something that Excel gives you. "It's really easy to build charts in Excel. But it's really hard to get the data in the right format to do that," says Dave Fowler, the founder of a data visualization company called Chartio.

Tools like Chartio and Tableau already let you slice and dice data in a more visual way. But these tools aren't meant for creating data sets on your own machine – they plug into massive business intelligence systems – and they aren't meant for the average joe. Arktos aims to bring data analysis to the personal machines of even the greenest computer users. And that's something we've spent thirty years waiting for.