Airtable's Acquisition Tells Us One Lesson

Do you see the Airtable sold today?

Yeah, they have $900 million in cash, so they got $1-point-something billion. The cash, of course, they get back out because that's theirs. So, you know, I know a lot of people are talking trash because they're saying 20% growth year over year, but I think a lot of that information is just off.

Yeah. So just so everyone knows, Airtable basically— and I'm going to share this with you. I think there's one lesson I want to call out, and this is from Jason Lemkin. This is pretty good over here. If you want one takeaway from the Airtable deal, if you look at this over here, you can see that in December 2021, they were doing about $156 million in annual recurring revenue. So ARR, right? June 2026, they're doing $480 million. So you had 3.1x ARR growth, which is pretty damn good in my opinion, right? On all accounts. Now, their equity value in December 2021 was $11.7 billion. Now, as of August 2026, the, the, I mean, they sold for For, I think they sold for this range, right? Did they sell for— no, they sold for $1.25 billion in cash, but this is the equity value.

Yeah, 'cause they're adding on, I believe, the cash they had in their bank account, 'cause that counts as equity as well.

But I think this is what's interesting, guys. It's not like, oh, they didn't embrace AI, because they did. I remember for quite a while their founder was talking about AI, and it wasn't— the lessons here aren't don't raise too much or embrace AI or move faster, Or VCs are evil or get profitable. There's only one lesson here. It's grow or die, right? And so in many cases, by the way, when you're growing on a, on a, like a 9-figure ARR number, 20% is by all accounts pretty damn good, right? But he's just saying that you got to grow even faster. That's 2026 because the expectations have risen. So I think that's interesting because by all accounts they were doing these things over here.

Yeah, but here's the thing, because I got quite a few text messages of this being like, dude, did you see that deal just happen? Airtable got bought out by bending spoons. I got, dude, the amount of texts I got on that, I think it was either 4 or 5 today, right? Which is a lot.

Who's texting you on that stuff?

Other entrepreneurs who have SaaS-based businesses and they were worried about valuations and they're even worried more after this.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. And I was, because they're just like, at 20%, this is ridiculously low. Who says they're growing at 20% a year? People are looking at what they're at now versus where they were years ago and assuming it's 20% growth a year. It could have been flat the last 12 months. It could have been they added the growth in a non-profitable way and they were just burning cash on the balance sheet to get it, right? There's a lot of other factors. It could be that their churn is increasing and there's something that must have went sideways in the business that the public isn't seeing. And why would Bending Spoons want to trash talk the company that they just acquired being like, no, here are all the things that are wrong, right? That would just make them look bad. They're in the business of fixing, cutting and fixing. And when you look at Airtable, no investor, I would say 99.99999% of investors would not sell a deal if it's actually really growing at 20% a year. They have strong retention, the unit economics are good, the business is healthy. This is a fire sale. The only reason they got a fire sale is because something's wrong. And of course they're not going to spill their bad blood over the internet and talk about what's wrong with the business.

So let me tell you why I think the Airtable outcome is a great one. Okay, let me tell you why. So most people haven't seen this piece over here. Okay, so Airtable right here in highlighted on my screen over here, you can see prior to entering into the purchase agreement, seller and its affiliates implemented a reorganization pursuant to which seller became the sole holder of the shares and assets and liabilities relating to the HyperAgent business, uh, business line were transferred by the company to HyperAgent Incorporated. Okay, HyperAgent is the agent business. So they still get to keep on— they get to keep the new entity, okay, while they offload the old piece, right? And it's not necessarily a terrible outcome for everyone, right? I think it takes an okay outcome to a pretty good one, I would say, for the founders of Airtable, at least. I can't speak for the employees and the rest of the shareholders here.

Well, the shareholders did not lose money. I'm guessing they didn't. I don't know how much Airtable raised. How much did—

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Yeah, they raised $1.35 to $1.4 billion in venture capital. So They got their money back plus more. You know, it's not the end of the world from an outcome perspective.

Yep. So I think it's a good outcome for the founders. I think it's a good outcome for Bending Spoons. We'll see what they do with it. And by the way, like I remember, by the way, Bending Spoons bought Evernote. And I remember when I was in Italy, I had a lot of notes in Evernote. I was kind of sharing these notes, right? I had a lot of stuff saved from years and years. And they were smart because Evernote, I think, would allow you to trial for a very long time. But Bending Spoons, the way they charge you for Evernote now, they'll charge you $7 for the trial and then they charge you per week, right? So that's how they make their money on it. And I'm like, okay, damn, like pretty good. They just adjust the pricing, they cut staff ultimately. I'm oversimplifying it a little bit, but there's a playbook that they're running is my point here.

The Bending Spoons playbook is just another version of what private equity runs, but Bending Spoons has been buying the ugly ducklings that a lot of private equity companies did not want. Because if you look at most private equity companies, they're looking for consistent growth on a 3-year period, ideally 20+% great unit economics. And they ideally want just businesses that they can buy and they just grow without them doing much, and then they can end up reselling them. Bending Spoons was— they were buying the ones that had issues and they're like, we will go and fix the issues. Private equity tends— most of them don't want to fix the issues because most of these PE guys are not operators themselves.

Yep. So here's, I mean, there's something that's related here. Let's just talk about business operations. We're not talking about private equity here. We're not talking about VC, but I want to talk about a core, core value, Neil, that, so Alfred Lin, who's one of the co-founders of Zappos. Yeah. And then he's partner at Sequoia now. So he wrote this piece over here and our mutual friend shared this with me. He texted this to me, but you can see this over here. This is an Empire State Building on the left side. Okay. And then on the right side, this is the Millennium Tower. Now, the Empire State Building, how long do you think it took to build this building in New York, Neil?

Uh, I don't know, 4 years, 3 years?

410 days. Okay, now this tower in the Millennium Tower inside of San Francisco, San Francisco, this Millennium Tower over here, how many years did it take?

I'll go with 5 years.

Exactly, 5 years, right? And so why, why did it take 5 years, you think, Neil?

Well, the tower in San Francisco, don't they have issues with the ground? And there was a lot of complications.

Bad foundation to begin but there's a lot of bureaucracies to even get it going in the first place. So it just took forever, right? Now, the title of this article here is Speed Above All Else. Okay. So, and this is something I think we should reinforce here. So, uh, commuters' most important value and most often challenged is speed above all else. Velocity and speed were core values at Slootman's company. So Frank Slootman, you have Snowflake, right? Uh, I think he was at some, some another big company, but, um, but many people challenge this speed as a core value, okay? So, multiple times a week, I'll get the question or challenge, if we're in healthcare, how can our value possibly be speed? Or you can either have it good or you could have it fast, right? Or some other ridiculous either-or type posit, right? And then he's just saying like, this is a false dichotomy meant to pigeonhole you into mediocrity. And he gave some examples here. Now, I want us to talk about this, right? So, Google Maps was a POS before, a piece of shit, right? And it was clunky, it didn't work before. And then Bret Taylor here, who runs Sierra now, was pissed off and he rebuilt it from scratch within 48 hours doing a coding binge over the weekend. It became the infrastructure that still runs. It's 1/3 of the size and literally 10 times faster load times, right? Then you have the initial iPod. It was conceived, designed, and shipped to customers within 7 months of starting by, what is this guy's name? Steve Fadell and Apple, right? And so it became the basis of a 10-year transformation of Apple into a trillion-dollar empire. That 7-month sprint was somewhat unprecedented in consumer hardware, but built a foundation. And we just talked about the Empire State Building, right? So the Millennium Tower, built in San Francisco in 2005, took 5 years with multiple committees, planning sessions, and community-guided safety. It is now leaning, tilting, deemed unsafe, and cannot be fully used. So all he's saying here ultimately is that you cannot have the people on your team that are just like, oh no, we can't do it. It's either got— it's got to be speed or something else, right?

Yeah.

And this person, and we've all worked with this person before, they slow you down. And ultimately, you want to build with great testing frameworks, pre-mortems, and intense heads-down focus, right? So all that to say, Neil, is this, right? You want to raise your standards. You want to make sure that you're here to accomplish a job. You got to increase the velocity and urgency. So I think it's a good reminder to people here that when people try to say, oh no, we can't do it that way, It's your job, especially if you're a leader, to say, oh no, but we can.

People just love giving excuses, and these excuses are why just things don't progress, and then they wonder why other people overtake them that were much smaller in the beginning.

Yep. And by the way, on that note, Neil, do you know why— so talking about speed, okay, I'm reading through this NVIDIA book right now. It's called Thinking Machines. So it's yet another NVIDIA book from my Taiwanese homie, Jensen Huang. And do you want to know why he never fires people?

Because if they can't fit into the culture, they just want to quit themselves and they can't bear it.

So, here's the thing. In the book, Jensen Huang, he will get into shouting matches with his distinguished engineers. He'll basically get everyone into a room and he will light them up for like 90 minutes, right? 90 minutes, you're lighting someone up, everyone else is just watching. It's very awkward, right? But he doesn't let the person go. Now, in another situation, he had someone, I think it was like an operational leader that was responsible for logistics, for example, right? They got in a shouting match and he's like, you don't know what you're talking about. And then the guy was like, I don't know what I'm talking about? I've been doing logistics for 20 years. Literally, she went to Taiwan. She found out that what Jensen was saying was actually correct. She went back to Jensen and she apologized. And Jensen's like, and then she's like, well, why? He's like, why are you apologizing? And she's like, because of X, Y, and Z. And Jensen's like, he didn't say apology accepted. He's like, that's the right answer. And he didn't light her up or anything like that, but everything is about just moving the ball forward ultimately. And Jensen himself has said, I'd rather torture you into greatness than let you go. And here's the thing, when I look at, I'm not saying I'm Jensen Huang.

Are you saying Jensen doesn't fire people or Nvidia? Because they had to fire people in their whole history.

They for sure fire people, but Jensen would prefer not to fire people because there's so many examples of these distinguished engineers. where he wouldn't let them go. In fact, when someone would quit before, like a really good engineer, he would actually almost get on his knees and get him in the office, like beg them to stay, right? So his whole thing is he'd rather torture you into greatness, right, versus letting you go. And when I look at— when I look at the reason, like, I'm so big— you mentioned this in the past— like, I'm so big on teaching people is I'm so big on kind of torturing them into greatness in my own way, right? I prefer them to grow.

Yeah.

Right. But, and sometimes like they just can't, right? But Jensen really doesn't like firing people. I'm not saying he never does, but he would prefer not to.

Yep. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of different management styles. Um, I was watching an earnings call, this was a long time ago on Amazon, and they were doing layoffs, or may not have been an earnings call, but it was an announcement either way. And they were doing layoffs and, uh, they weren't talking about how they were laying off factory workers. You know, because not factory workers, uh, fulfillment center workers. I don't know what it's called, you know, people helping with logistics and stuff like that. And one of the people called out, well, you don't really need to. Your churn is like X amount of months or a year or whatever, so you just don't have to rehire. It's actually just cheaper to let them go than it is to give them severance. And, uh, you know, of course no one really said anything on that end.

There's no response?

Not really. There was a response, but it was like a canned response. It wasn't, in my opinion, an honest response.

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