0:52
Airtable tripled revenue to $480 million but sold for $1.25 billion, down from an $11.7 billion valuation. The lesson: growth alone isn't enough anymore. SaaS companies now need to accelerate faster just to justify their valuations.
Airtable tripled revenue to $480 million but sold for $1.25 billion, down from an $11.7 billion valuation. The lesson: growth alone isn't enough anymore. SaaS companies now need to accelerate faster just to justify their valuations.
There's only one lesson here. It's grow or die. And this is from Jason Lemkin. 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, on all accounts. Now their equity value in December 2021 was $11.7 billion. Now, as of August 2026, they sold for $1.25 billion in cash, but this was the The equity value. But I think this is what's interesting, guys. It's not like a, oh, they didn't embrace AI because they did. I remember for quite a while their founder was, you know, talking about AI. By all accounts, they were doing these things over here. When you're growing like a 9-figure ARR number, 20% is by all accounts pretty damn good. But he's just saying that you got to grow even faster. That's 2026 because the expectations have risen.
