In this candid interview, Airtable co‑founder and CEO Howie Liu walks through how he runs his day, the product development rhythm, and his obsessive immersion in emerging AI tools. He explains that he eliminates low‑impact recurring meetings, blocks time each week for hands‑on product work, and insists the team dog‑feeds and ships meaningful features regularly. Liu also describes his habit of signing up for and paying for dozens of early‑stage AI startups to evaluate them like an investor, never canceling subscriptions so he can periodically reassess. He showcases how he uses AI‑powered platforms such as Replit to "vibe‑code" microsites that blend no‑code speed with deep research, turning ideas into interactive prototypes faster than traditional docs or slides. The conversation shifts to governance: Liu stresses the importance of retaining board control and building a lean decision‑making structure to preserve founder autonomy during the product‑market‑fit phase. He warns against over‑optimizing for headline valuations, describing fundraising as a stage where ego can drive unnecessary meetings and prolonged closing cycles. He outlines founder anti‑patterns—"barking louder than the bite" and cultivating an unattainable mystique—that can backfire, and shares a personal anecdote about how politely declining investor outreach actually increased interest. On talent, Liu argues that hiring should be continuous, even during downsizing, likening the organization to the Ship of Theseus: the company must replace floorboards over time to evolve into an AI‑native entity, bringing fresh perspectives to shift culture. Finally, when asked about "grit," Liu frames it as the entropy‑driven texture of life, the adversity that makes the hero’s journey worthwhile, contrasting a static equilibrium (death) with the chaotic drive to create. Overall, Liu provides a window into the operational habits, strategic mind‑set, and philosophical outlook of a founder navigating the AI‑driven future while maintaining a focus on execution, autonomy, and continuous learning.
Chapters
We need to operate differently to be able to generate asymmetric upside. Anyone who expects to come in and like play a known role with an existing playbook, like by definition almost is like probably not going to be a good fit. Personally for Airtable, like I think we do have to radically refound the company and break a lot of the current way of working in order to win, right? Like we do have an existing distribution base. We do have these no-code components. It'd be really hard to go and like build those from scratch. The wrong approach would be to say like, okay, let's just take our existing product, our existing business, and slap some AI on top of it. And frankly, I think a lot of the really large incumbents are effectively doing that. I think when you're a first-time founder, like I had no experience, I didn't have wisdom, I didn't have like, you know, credibility. So all I had was sweat.
Welcome to Grit. I'm Juvin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on Grit, we have Howie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Airtable, the now AI-native platform trusted by over 500,000 organizations globally to build powerful apps without writing code. They're at a very interesting time in their business, as many incumbents are grappling with what this transformation of technology actually means for them. How he reflects on Airtable's evolution into a foundational tool for modern work. We talk about what it's like to build AI-native companies today versus what it was like for him 10+ years ago. Enjoy the episode. When you started your first company, you were how old?
20 or maybe just had turned 21.
21. Yeah. And that was like 15 years ago?
Yeah. 2009 I graduated and then Right away, pretty much applied to YC with a college friend of mine. And, and then we got in for that winter's batch. So it started in like whatever, January of 2010.
Okay. And then you raise a seed?
Small seed. I mean, seed at that time was like $700K and we were pretty proud of like, oh man, we raised a real round. We had a $4 million cap on our note.
Yeah.
And for the time that was like pretty decent as a seed round.
Yeah.
But it was— I mean, the whole thing was very scrappy. Like, you know, it was 2 people. We built a product, we launched it.
No fancy execs.
No fancy execs. Like, we only ever got to like 4 people total. We hired 2 additional people for that company and then we basically went into an acquihire process, you know, and Salesforce was the winner that, that picked us up.
What does an acquihire process mean?
It means—
You were over it and you wanted to sell the company?
Well, not so much that like we were fully over it. Like, I actually still had, you know, optimism about our prospects as a company. I think we were in a really interesting space. We were one of the early pioneers of innovation on email, right? So our first product was basically an extension that would plug into Gmail and show you this overlay sidebar. We literally hacked the DOM. We were like, I think the first to actually figure out how to reverse engineer injecting our own UI on top of the Gmail UI.
Mm-hmm.
Reportive and other products would later do it. As well. But on top of that, we also had a standalone CRM product where we would suck in your emails, your phone calls, et cetera, and show you this kind of evergreen Rolodex, right? Like, here's all the people you talked to recently. And so I still had conviction that there was a there there in that space, and I still do. I think there's a lot of value to be created, especially now in the agentic era, around rethinking what email and relationship management workflows look like, especially for the individual. But it was kind of this moment where, you know, one, like, I think, um, you know, we had the humility to acknowledge, like, we don't know, like, the playbook to build this into a big business, right? And, like, you know, one path to get there is to just, like, trial and error, do it as an independent company. Um, but another path is, like, you know, we had a lot of suitors knocking. I think we, we had demonstrated as a very small team the ability to build high-quality product.
Yeah.
Like, you know, we, we did a single-page app, like, we did the Chrome extension thing, like, These were things that were not really that well established at the time. This was long before React or even Backbone, these frontend frameworks that made it easy. So we kind of showed we could build high quality product very quickly. And we had a number of different bigger companies knocking on our doors. And I think it was a moment where the temptation to say, okay, well, we're scrapping it out, we're eating burritos every night, we're sleeping on air beds in the office every night. And we don't really know what the path to get to success successes, even though there is still a potential path. And then on the other hand, maybe we go take an exit. We can basically learn a lot wherever we go, and then the next thing we each do can be a lot more forethought.
That makes sense. Did you make good money?
Good for the time. I mean, look, I grew up in a very, very financially modest family. My parents were both first-generation immigrants, so they came here with very little in their pockets.
From where?
So I'm actually Korean, but my parents grew up in China. So my grandparents moved to China from Korea, and then my parents were born in China, and then they moved to the States. So I was born in actually Texas. And so they were very modest. We had a very modest family growing up. And so basically I made very low 7 figures on day 1 of this exit, which for me was like this profound, like life-changing event from going, you know, from this scrappy ramen diet and, and like, you know, basically, um, knowing I couldn't go back and just rely on my family to fund, you know, to pay the bills, uh, to now having enough—
Like a couple million dollars.
Yeah, like, I mean, enough to like, A, not have to worry about like paying rent in the near future, and B, like feeling like I could have some breathing room to really think about like, Okay, what's the next thing I wanna do? And it doesn't have to be something I launch in like weeks. I mean, the blessing and the curse of that first company and the YC model was like, we felt like we had to just put something out there in the span of 10 weeks. And I think that's a good, good thing in some ways, 'cause you have to go just test product market fit. But it's constraining because there are certain types of products, Airtable included. Figma's another one actually that started around the same time and also took, I think, over 2 years before launching.
Yeah.
That just, you could not go and like launch overnight.
Yeah.
I think it afforded me the luxury of being able to go and really stew on the next thing for longer.
Yeah. When you were— and you were 21 when that happened?
Yeah, I might have turned 22 by that, by the time of the acquisition.
So you go to Salesforce, you make a couple million dollars, you're 22 years old. You don't come from money.
No.
What are you, like king of the castle at this point? How did you feel? Did you feel rich? You must have felt rich.
I mean, in a sense, Relative to my own kind of modest beginnings, for sure. That's what I mean.
I don't think relative to now when your company's worth like $12 billion.
Well, not only that, but I think at that point, it's kind of like the more you know, the more you realize how little you know, right? And I think in a way, it's like the more money you get, the more you realize, oh, I'm actually just still a tiny, tiny minnow in this broader ocean of highly successful people. Financial outcome has never been my primary motivator, but I think just getting to that exit made me realize, wow, this is still a very small and modest outcome compared to the size of scale that either other entrepreneurs or even just business people have created. And so I think mainly my takeaway was like, okay, I now have the ability to, like, go big and swing big. Um, it wasn't like a, okay, like, I've got laurels to rest on. Like, I feel like the king.
Yeah. Did you get to spend, like, money on young people things? Like, did you get to do the, like, did you, like, get to do that?
I mean, look, I upgraded, like, what was a much scrappier apartment with roommates to a nicer apartment still with roommates. Um, and I mean, I think the one nice purchase I made for myself was, uh, was like, a used BMW M6, which, you know, I always loved cars and like, yeah, had a V10 engine. Yeah, that's kind of cool. But like, but you know, it's like, that's not even like a Ferrari. It's not like a crazy car.
Yeah. And probably like within, I would venture to guess like a month, you were like, oh, this feels like any other car I've ever driven.
I actually loved that car for like the full 6, 7 years. I actually gave it to my brother. So like, it's still around in our family. Like he doesn't drive it now, but like, like I actually, I don't, I don't actually think I want to ever sell that car. Like, I mean, it's, it's like, to me, it's like symbolic of a, like, you know, just that moment in time. Um, there's nostalgia to that, like, feeling I had. And B, I mean, it's a cool car. Like, it's, it's a little timeless.
Yeah, it is a cool car. Now, I mean, the company is not public yet, but during the COVID days, you got a giant valuation, like $12 billion. I have no idea, but I assume you like Hopefully took some money off the table, whatever. Like, you've probably experienced a level of wealth that you didn't previously have.
Yeah.
That when you were growing up in Texas, that million, $2 million felt like, oh man, if one day I could get to the $2 million.
Yeah.
Could you imagine?
Yeah.
You know, and your parents probably like, I imagine your parents when you made that were like, what the hell? Like, is it?
Yeah. I mean, serious. Like, yeah. I mean, I think my parents have always, you know, been fairly both understanding of the career path I chose. So like, When I first said, "Look, I want to do the startup thing. I'm not going to take a normal job." Like they didn't freak out. They actually were highly supportive. In fact, like you know, they they were willing to like you know help fund you know kind of my ramen diet for the first few months of it. Like literally, hey, do you need a check to like pay the bills for a few months to try this out? Even though it's not like they had a big coffer to pull from. And and then I think when the the first exit happened, I mean, like I think it was a proud moment for all of us. And, uh, but like, you know, in a way it's like we didn't over-rotate on the, like the finances of it. Right. Uh, and I think for me, uh, and my family, it was more of like, wow, like you got to pursue your dream, which is like to build something from scratch and like, you know, to kind of like create your own company, work for yourself. And like, I think that part was the greater pride, um, that we had. And even like later, um, to your point, like as Airtable scaled into like a you know, kind of sizable unicorn, decacorn type of company. I think at every moment, like, you know, my mom will still to this day send me like little clippings of like, you know, here's Airtable mentioned in, in some like obscure news outlet, right? Like, here's like a Chinese news company that like wrote about Airtable and its competition, right? And like, you know, she'll always like send me stuff or like say, oh, wow, like, good job on this, you know, interview or whatever. And so it's more of the journey, I think, that we've kind of fixated on than the outcome.
Yeah, but do you feel that way on a day-to-day? Is your lived reality that you got to let go of half the company, or now AI is coming and it's an existential threat to your business? When that happens, are you like, man, I'm really enjoying this journey right now. Like, I'm decoupled from the outcome.
Look, I mean, I would be lying if I said, like, the whole way has been, like, happy times, smooth sailing, like, just, like, loved every single second of it. I mean, look, there were, there were, like, really rough moments of the journey. Like, I mean, to your point, like, riffing, we did 2 riffs that collectively cut the company from effectively 1,280 people, which, by the way, we, we, like, scaled way too rapidly to from 50 people in, like, less than 3 years. Maybe even like less than two and a half years, and but like had to cut it back down to roughly six hundred. So that I mean that's a big painful you know choice and and thing to do right? And and like the knowledge that each of those you know six hundred ish you know roles is a person too that we've impacted that I've impacted. I mean that that like you know those those moments are not fun right? And then. In between, there's also a lot of grind and slog where it's not just up and to the right and just the tough everyday decisions, sometimes having to let go of individual execs or just dealing with business challenges. So I think the journey is, at least in my experience, a rocky one. And yet you kind of have to enjoy the hard thing. Um, you know, or else like, it's just, it's, it's never going to be like perpetually easy. And in fact, like, you know, the, the, there have been like stretches where it felt like it was easy and growth just came like, you know, very, you know, naturally to us, right? Like we didn't, we didn't feel like we had to go out and like fight for growth or do completely new hard things for growth. We just got growth, right? And we got valuation increases and everything was just kind of swimming along. in harmony. And I always felt some unease in those moments. And maybe at the time I would've said, oh, maybe that's just some subconscious guilt or fear of this is too easy. But in retrospect, I actually think—
Your instinct was right.
My instinct was right, which is my mental model for growth and just high growth in general is you have these really important moments in time, that, you know, you get something really right. Obviously the founding moment, getting that initial product market fit, like you got something right. And, you know, from there, I think a lot of the in-between that looks like smooth and durable growth is actually just coasting on or milking, you know, kind of that, that spark of like innovation or like breakthrough. And like, and for some companies you can coast a very long time on that.
Sure.
But for others, like, you know, if you coast for too long, you don't kind of go and fight the good fight to like, do the next hard thing, eventually that well runs dry, right? And you see that in either plateauing growth or just competitive intensification, more companies doing what you're doing, and it's starting to commoditize your space. Or, I mean, as you hinted at with AI, it's like, does your whole space become irrelevant? Now, maybe not overnight is that going to impact your revenue numbers, but if you squint and look 5 years from now, even 3 years from now, like does, you know, the old premise of RSpace, no code, like what does that mean when, you know, AI is getting so smart it can build apps, right? Like agentically. And so like, I think you really do have to like, you know, anticipate that. I mean, it's the Andy Grove quote, right? Like you have to be paranoid because the moment that you go too long without being paranoid and like coast on the easy times, I think by the time you need to like innovate and create that next spark, it's probably too late.
Yeah. And to your comment earlier about your parents and you being proud of you pursuing your dreams, working for yourself, why was it your dream to start a company? Have you ever actually asked yourself that?
Yeah. I mean, it was somehow just rooted into my psyche from pretty early on, maybe a confluence of definitely being a nerd, Like all throughout, I mean my life, but like especially in childhood, I definitely was like you know the nerd's nerd, right? And like I mean you know summers for me were like going and like reading sci-fi books, playing games when we first got a computer, like getting really into like just learning how to do everything I possibly could on this computer, playing games, like and then later writing programs, using the internet. I loved exploring. Exploring all the things that you could do, like, you know, especially on the internet, right? Like I had like a little eBay store where I was like buying and selling, um, like different trading cards, collectibles, making some profit on it. Um, I built like a website that, you know, maybe got like 10 hits per day on my little traffic counter and like, I was really proud of like the 2 cents a week that I got in AdSense revenue from that, you know, but I just loved like tinkering and trying to understand like the technology, but then also the products and then even the businesses that could be built. In this ecosystem, maybe because it was like, so it felt like something that just was so like natural to me. And like, I just loved it as a medium. And like, you know, the idea that, wow, I could build an entire career, like I can actually make my job like doing more of this stuff and like getting to kind of like explore and tinker more. Like that was kind of cool. And, uh, and I think like early on, like I learned about like either through just, I mean, at the time, like Web 1.0, there was a lot of popular media coverage of the hot tech companies, the Web 1.0 companies, right? I remember watching an interview segment with the Excite founders and being like, oh, that's so cool. I use Excite. And these guys, I mean, these people, they're just in a garage. They built this thing. Anyone can do this. Or even reading about the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates story at the time. And this is well in the '90s, but hearing about, wow, You know, I think Bill Gates had just become like the richest person in the world. It's like, wow, like, you know, tech is not only like a possible career path, it might be like one of the best career paths, right? If you can crack the nut. So I think I just like kind of early on rationalized it as like a real thing, even though it wasn't a very obvious path if you went through like the linear, like job recruiting circuit, right? I remember in college, Like, and I went to Duke. I didn't study CS for a few reasons, even though I was already like fluent in programming and actually ended up taking some elective CS classes. But the irony is like, of maybe the, call it 30 people who graduated from CS my class year, like, I think like only a small handful of them wanted to go into tech and none of them wanted to go into startups. Maybe there was like one or two actually. But, but like the majority of them wanted to actually do like banking or like go work for like a consulting firm, etc. And so it just like going and doing your own startup thing was just not at all like there was no clear way to get there. And yet for me, it just like it's— it felt so obviously like the thing that I wanted to do.
That makes sense. And so after the first one, you knew you wanted to do another one.
Yeah.
You hang out at Salesforce for a year.
Yeah, a little over a year, year and a half.
And then you get the gang back together. You do it with a different group of folks.
Different, different team. So actually, like both my first uh, company co-founder Evan, uh, and my 2 co-founders from Airtable were all college friends. So we all went to Duke. And I mean, you know, especially since Duke was East Coast, it was very like finance and like traditional, like, you know, uh, job heavy. Like we were kind of the weird kids who like actually read TechCrunch back in like '07, '08.
Totally.
And we're like learning about Ruby on Rails and building web apps. And like, I mean, definitely like, you know, like in the, in the kind of niche nerd camp of being interested in all this tech stuff. And so I'm still very good friends with my first co-founder. He's now working on a robots company that's actually really interesting. But yeah, just kind of at this time, and actually Andrew, who was my— so Andrew and Emmett are my 2 co-founders of Airtable. Andrew, I was actually roommates with during the whole first company eTax experience. And I think at various points I had tried to convince him to like join us or work with us. And he was like, I just got a sweet job at Google. This is early days, like Google PM role under Marissa Mayer. Like they just flew me around the world on this cool tour. I actually have benefits. I'm not eating burritos every day. I think I'm going to like learn from here for a little bit. But then the second time around, like, you know, just the timing worked out and like I'd always wanted to work with him. And so, yeah, we were able to just, you know, kind converge on the idea of Airtable.
And then the idea converges. You found the company.
Yeah.
And then how long did it take you? You said, hey, like, the good and bad thing about YC is we shipped a product in 10 weeks.
Yeah.
How long did it take you to ship this product?
So ship to fully GA, like, over 2 years. Damn. Yeah. Which is an eerily parallel timeline to Figma, both in, like, the amount of time it took.
Eerily long.
eerily long, but also literally the same moment in time, like an absolute date. Interesting.
Did you know Dylan then?
Yeah, I mean, we probably didn't get to know each other until a few years into the journey for each. Actually, maybe early on, because I remember we were both early PLG productivity tools doing some interesting stuff with web. And I mean, you got to realize for the first few years of both Airtable and Figma, we weren't instant overnight hot successes, right? I mean, Figma and Airtable both took a few years to really pick up that steam. And obviously now Figma is an incredible business. And I got to read the S-1 as everybody else did, what was it, a week ago?
Pretty amazing.
I mean, incredible, right? Just from a product that was basically initially Photoshop in the cloud to then Sketch in the cloud. And now, I mean, a real giant of revenue. I mean, yeah, by all the objective financial investor metrics, like an amazing business. But I think the reason why we both spent that much time building the product is, A, we were working on hard problems technically at the time. We both had to kind of pioneer our own kind of both full-stack kind of development principles and kind of the architecture for doing real-time collab on different data models. I think we both pioneered our own frontend frameworks because Again, React and some of the now frameworks for building rich frontend experiences did not exist. For us, I think what was interesting is that I knew it was like we didn't want to go and spend 2 years in a hole just building a product and not knowing if it would work or not. And so we tried to get early incremental milestones of validation. So the first prototype of Airtable was frontend only. We completely faked the backend.
Yeah.
Even though we knew we needed to do it correctly later and do the whole real-time database engine thing. But we knew initially, the whole premise of this product hinges on our ability to distill app building into this really intuitive GUI product, right? And so if we don't get the frontend, that UX right, the backend is wasted effort, right? And so let's get the frontend to work. And so we built a frontend that even that cut a lot of corners, We wanted to get the core principles of like, you take a spreadsheet metaphor, you layer in some like database and like application building capabilities. So there's actually like data types and you can attach files and like you have, you know, different like field types, like dropdowns instead of just text. And you can do things like, you know, link different tables together. Like you have a proper relational database setup that maybe is more akin to like a Microsoft Access, FileMaker Pro, but in the web, really simple. And we like literally built that product. The first version actually, um, as a test, like it would persist your data into like a client-side cookie, which like, you know, that, that's kind of a, it would be a nuts way to actually go live with the product. But for us, it allowed us to validate, you know, can this product work? And we went and actually put it into the hands of a few friends and family to see like, would you use this? Can you figure out how to use it? And like, can you, you know, like once you use it, like, What's your kind of workflow pattern? And I think we got enough validation from those different incremental milestones to continue having the conviction to invest the full 2 years into building the complete product.
Yeah, it's a long time.
Yeah.
It's a long time to be building without too much real-life feedback.
Yeah, it's crazy, especially how fast things are moving now. It's only been a few years since ChatGPT breakout moment, right? Like, it just, you know, it feels like 2 years is like, like ancient history at this point.
I mean, yeah. Now investors are like, if you can't get to Series A in 2 years, you know, like you're not moving fast enough.
Totally.
How often do you wake up with cold sweats thinking about the 20-year-old version of Howie that's like coming out of school bright-eyed and bushy-tailed without any of the baggage that you have, like none of the family and like you have like just, just raw, like they can live on ramen type thing.
Yeah.
And they have all these tools.
Yeah.
And like, I don't know, I wonder like if you were to honestly handicap you again building Airtable from the ground up with the tools that you would have at your disposal now.
Yeah.
I don't know. Could you do it? could you get from 2 years to 6 months? Like, could you get— yeah, not perfect, probably, but you know what I mean? Like, could you get from 2 years to 3 months?
Yeah.
Like, could you— you had, you know, how many people? 2 of you? 3 of you? 4 of you?
Uh, 2 initially, then 3, and then like maybe at the time we publicly launched, like still less than 10. Yeah.
Like, could you do it with just 2 of you?
4 of you? Yeah.
Could you just, you know, like, I'm sure you've done this like mental gymnastics.
Yeah. I mean, look, I, I think, um, the short answer is absolutely We could do it much faster now. And part of that, I would say if I were to do it again, I could even do it much faster even without new tech, right? I mean, like I said, even pre-AI, we did have to build our own frontend frameworks, et cetera.
Right.
Now you would just have all that out of the box for free to build on. The hosting would be easier. There's better infra options. So all of that, yeah, for sure there's more leverage afforded by all the new technical foundation. Not to mention, and there's actually now, I think more recently, I'm in this chat group that has a lot of other founders debating now, does AI, basically augmented coding, actually enhance productivity, or does it just make you feel like you're more productive? Because you actually spend so much time using the AI, prompting the AI, that it actually, especially for smaller tasks, is net neutral, right? Or even net negative. Um, so I'm not convinced that like, okay, just because like you use Cursor now, like you're 10 times more productive in all cases, but I do think you could do it faster for a number of reasons. If you relaunch, like if you try to rebuild Airtable today, the good news for us as Airtable is like, you know, we're not, um, at threat of disruption by somebody who recreates like 2015 era Airtable because now our product has also evolved quite a bit. Right. And we have like a lot more scalability, robust capabilities, et cetera, that if you wanted to replicate everything we have, it would take you far more than a year or 6 months. But I do think there is an interesting question of, is there a complete paradigm shift? So to me, the really interesting companies to watch are actually the vibe coding products. So the Replit, the vZeros, the Lovables, et cetera, not because they're actually coming heads on against us for the same use cases, same customers, Um, like a lot of those use cases are prototyping, right? So it's like, let me build like a prototype, almost more like Framer.
Yeah.
Um, for a non-technical PM or designer or even a technical engineer who like just doesn't want to spend the time building like a real version of this, this app, uh, or, or a surface area. Let me just go prototype it. Right. Um, and that's pretty magical. I think there's like massive value to be created from those products for a different set of use cases than what we go after, which are more like robust business use cases, you know, uh, small companies building their CRM in Airtable, bigger companies doing like, you know, all their marketing operations in Airtable. But yet I see this convergence eventually of like that kind of agentic app building experience and like what, what, uh, value we provide, right? So to me, it's less about like, is this product, is our product today going to instantly, you know, kind of be recreated by somebody else? And more like, is there a completely new way of thinking about the job to be done that somebody new who, I mean, to your point, is probably working insane hours because they don't have a baby or the family and they can go on the ramen diet and just be all in. I think that is a real question that I ask.
That probably all of your founder friends in that group chat are talking about right now.
For sure. I mean, I think the best way to make that threat less foreign, at least, is get close to those people, right? So I've personally made it a point to try to invest in or just get involved in a lot of these companies, whether it's like Varun from Windsurf is a perfect example of this archetype, right?
Yeah. So hungry.
He was so young when he started the company, right? Before he was even an IDE and just works so hard and so fast, right? And like to get close to people like that, and hopefully I can offer some wisdom from like my experience and scaling Airtable and how to think about the business. But like, it's a mutual exchange too, because like, I think you are the company that you keep. You kind of pick up the traits subconsciously of like the people that you spend time with and are inspired by. as much as I, in a past era, wanted to be inspired by people who had done much larger scale companies than me, right? So I would go and try to spend time with the entrepreneurial greats.
Yeah, like the Benioffs of the world.
Yeah, the Benioffs, the Zucks, et cetera. And I learned a lot from getting to spend time with folks like that. But also now it's like I now have the risk of becoming the incumbent who needs to move faster and be inspired by the—
You want to be inspired by velocity.
Exactly. So Like, that's, I mean, honestly, like a lot of the time I spend with external companies now is like, is that, is like, you know, the, these like upstarts and companies that we're investing in. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Like you go talk to Harvey or some of these folks and it's like, yeah, they're moving. They are moving.
Yeah. And it's, they just, they have this different feel to them both as founders and as companies. Like in a way it's like they've thrown out not just the old product model. Um, there's this really interesting concept, uh, that actually, uh, Benchmark has been articulating recently, which is inside-out instead of outside-in thinking. Outside-in thinking is like traditional jobs to be done. You understand a market, a segment. I think of like, you know, vertical solution companies is very much in this vein, right? Like they're not going and pioneering like crazy breakthrough tech. They're just taking a known problem and solving it better than anybody else, right? With pretty commodity tech. And you can still build an incredible business that way, like the Service Titans, et cetera, of the world. But now AI innovation is kind of being dominated by inside-out innovation, which is where you have to actually understand the tech. You have to be at the bleeding edge of understanding every new model release, what's possible, how do you build a product experience around that? There's a know-how gap that doesn't come in an O'Reilly book right now of like, okay, there's the raw models, but then here's how you build an amazing agentic experience like a Manus. Around that, right? And I think like, it's the, that kind of inside-out tech-first innovation that is actually creating a lot of alpha now. And I think to think about it that way requires not just a different lens on product and what the product experience should be, but also like the business model and also like the operating model of the company, right? Like the way that you operate can't be on like quarterly or annual planning cycles and you do these like, you know, year-end reviews. I mean, by that time, like, a year is like forever in AI. It's 6 model releases. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, a company like Cursor a year ago was probably a sub-$10 million revenue business, right? As was Windsurf. And by the way, both companies I really admire and got to plug into, at least with a small angel check at around that time. But what I most admire is how fast they were able to execute. execute and have been able to execute, right? Like, Windsurf, I think they came in with the IDE pivot after Cursor, right? They were seeing Cursor really take off.
I think they were seeing Copilot really take off.
Well, that was true for sure. And that's when they built the first— before Windsurf, there was Codium. Before Codium, there was their first thing, which was like the—
Exec function.
Exec function, which was more like inference optimization. But they kind of, at every point, they were really smart to leverage the pieces they had before. So it wasn't like, throw this entirely away, build a completely new thing from scratch. It was like the inference optimisation allowed them to build a better Copilot plugin. So they didn't have their own IDE, they just built a plugin, but they could offer better, cheaper, faster because they had more optimised inference so they could do lower latency, lower cost Copilot basically as a plugin to other IDEs. But then I think as they saw Cursor go all in on like, let's just own the entire IDE experience, let's do a full fork of VS Code, then I think they realised, okay, that's clearly where the you know, where the buck is. And then they also forked VS Code. And I think like from start to finish, like when they decided to fork, like I think they built the entire first version of Windsurf, like the full-on IDE with like Cascade, the kind of sidebar, like, you know, Composer agentic, like, you know, kind of experience. Like I think they built that in like 2 months.
Yeah.
Which is insane. Like what in any larger company, like what significant product could be built from start to finish in 2 months?
Totally. Even your point on the V0s, the Lovables of the world, I have gotten excited about, and I'm not technical. If there was technical and then non-technical, I'm kind of to the right of non-technical, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
And I just got excited about this product and this idea of a product, and I was jamming on customers with it. I wanted to see if there was a there there, and I just spent a Saturday in one of these tools, just like jamming it out.
Yeah.
And, you know, uh, I got a designer friend excited about it.
Yeah.
And they use like the traditional design tools that ended up in like slides.
Right.
And my instinct continued to be when I was showing it to customers to just go into the actual, like the lovable where it's interactive.
Yeah.
And I could like actually be living in it, like changing things on the fly.
Yeah.
And then I just told the designer like, hey, Let's just collaborate in here. And like, it's not a product, but it's not slides either. It's like, it's like we're a lot closer to product than we are prototype.
Yeah.
And it's a lot more dynamic in that sense. And like, even me, like I'm, you know, building something interactive with natural language. Like, it's insane. Like it is in this world. There's a lot of conversation now around like how great developers become better.
Yeah.
But like, I have I have never felt like the artist of a computer was always the coder.
Yeah.
And I never felt like I could hold a paintbrush in my hand to be able to create a piece of art. And for the first time, I really feel like I have the brush in my hand that I can draw something that's not like Like, if you were to draw Picasso, like, I would draw something ugly that you'd see on the side of the street. But like, at least I'm still like, I can still call it something.
Well, maybe it's like you're not going to try to recreate a Picasso. You're going to build your own thing that like uniquely you value, right? I mean, like—
Correct. I've just never felt personally like I've ever been like, had access to the same sets of tools that someone like you has had access to in the world of like computers.
Yeah.
And for the first time, I really do feel quite empowered to just in English tell them what I want to do, and it just goes and does it and writes the code for me on the backend. Like, it's pretty incredible.
Yeah.
Like, it really, really is incredible.
Yeah. I mean, so we like went way into the deep end at the founding of Airtable, like looking back at like the history of computing, personal computing. And it turns out, I mean, like This was like the original vision by some of the early computing pioneers like Alan Kay and this guy J.C.R. Licklider. They envisioned a world where everybody who used computers and everybody should use computers could then not only use prebuilt applications, but instead actually open the hood and build their own applications, right? They could actually use— I mean, software is the fuel that runs through all computing devices, right? And yet If you can actually be a participant in creating those experiences, you have full control over what's possible with the computer versus if you're using a canned app, it's almost like you don't really get to gain full leverage on the power of software and computing in general. Right. And I think that's basically what you're describing, which is most people today still haven't really been able to participate in the actual use of software as a medium, as opposed to these prebuilt applications and devices that they've used at the surface level. And the whole vision for no-code was always about bringing anyone closer to that medium of, in Airtable, even before Agentic, you could just go in and use drag and drop to change the data. If you had a CRM and you're like, hey, here's my investment CRM, and you went to other people you're working with and said, hey, look, you want to change it? I can just change it right here. I'll add a field. I'll change the interface layout. That was one step closer towards the promised land of anyone can just go in and stick their hands into the computer and change how it works. I think now having agentic experiences where it's even more natural, you get to talk to like an agent and it builds it for you, but you can still then inspect and see what it's built so that it's not like kind of opaque to you. I think that's kind of the holy grail.
Yeah. I mean, it's almost like these LLMs and what they can do is like the fullest expression of low-code, no-code.
It is. And yet I think actually you have to blend the 2 concepts because one of the downsides of pure codegen, with agents is that if you're not a developer, all you can do is do visual inspection on the rendered app output to see what's going on, right? So in the CRM example, you could go into one of these vibecoding products and say, hey, build me a CRM for my VC firm, right? And track the deals.
Yep.
And it would do it. And you could literally look at the output HTML and say, oh, that kind of looks right. But you wouldn't be able to inspect the data model underneath, and maybe there's some automations or logic workflow that says every time I add a new portfolio company, do this thing. And it'd be really hard to actually inspect everything underneath the hood and say this is correct, right? And it'd be really hard also for you to go and manually try out every scenario just manually in the product. And so I think that's where the no-code representation that agents can now generate as an intermediary. So you're not like generating raw code, but you're actually outputting like these no-code components. Like here's, you know, a data model that you can understand because you get to see it right as a table and it's very easy to like interact with. But here's also the interface on top of it and here's how the interface layout works. So you can go and directly drag and drop it kind of like you would like a website in Squarespace or Wix. Like, you know, I think it's, it's, it's the best of both worlds if you can go and have the agent go and do everything, through conversational input, but then still see more than just raw HTML and code that is unintelligible to a non-developer. Right.
Yeah. And what's interesting is in your founder group chat today, when everyone's talking about this, if it is the best of both worlds and you're right, your business is undervalued. And if it's not the best of both worlds, then you might be— We could be in hot water.
Right. Yeah.
And I think that's the core of the question that any incumbent, air quotes, is wrestling with right now, which is like, okay, is what I am doing like a building block to the future that integrated tightly and appropriately will actually lead to a better outcome?
For sure.
Or am I just convincing myself of that? Because the alternative reality is I then have to rebuild my entire company from scratch, which is basically untenable. Yeah. Which is the story of every incumbent that has ever been Disrupted before?
Well, I think, I think if you literally have no incumbent advantages at all, like you're better off literally selling the company for whatever you can get right now and going and starting a new one from scratch, right? Just because literally you won't have all the drag from the current company business model, like expectations, even like cap table structure. Like if you start a new company from scratch, you can fully incentivize every single person there to like pursue this new thing, right? So you have to truly believe that, or else, uh, you, you have some incumbent advantages, or else like rationally the right thing to do is to just like sell and move on. Right. And, and refound, like literally refound. Um, personally for Airtable, like I do actually really truly believe like we have the right pieces to win at this. I don't think it's guaranteed by any means. And I think we do have to radically refound the company and break a lot of the current way of working as well as like the current way the product works. In order to to win, right? Meaning, like I almost see our current, like our pre, you know, kind of AI native company as a parts bin that I get to pilfer from. And like, you know, as an example, like we do have an existing distribution base. That's a valuable part, right? Like we do have these no-code components. That that's a valuable part. Like it would be really hard if somebody knew, like if a let's say Replit wanted to create like. Really reliable, scalable, no-code components like this data layer that has real-time collab built in. And you can just have AI now generate the data layer, but it's got this Airtable-like data I/O experience, right? And then a really nice interface layout engine, et cetera. All the integrations, the scalability part, it'd be really hard to go and build those from scratch. I mean, you could do it, but that's another part from the parts bin. But I think the wrong approach would be to say, okay, let's just take our existing product, our existing business, and slap some AI on top of it. And frankly, I think a lot of the really large incumbents are effectively doing that, right?
Yeah.
Especially in the enterprise SaaS space. And I think that's where it's like, well, you can never incrementally get to the promised land because the promised land, I mean, this launch we just did a couple weeks ago was really about saying, look, we had some AI capabilities before in Airtable, We had what we called CoBuilder, which is a one-shot way to generate a new app from scratch with AI. So you come in and say, build me that CRM, generates an app from scratch. But then it wasn't a full agent that could go and manipulate and do anything else that you wanted on the app. It was a one-shot. And then we had AI fields that could do some stuff at runtime. So you could generate content or do summaries, et cetera, on a row-by-row level. So for every portfolio company, summarize the current deal or whatever. So we had, I would say, the obvious AI capabilities to build. But when I look back at the— or when I look at the true AI-native disruptors, like these kind of codegen agents, these vibe coding products from scratch, they're taking a radically different approach, right? Which is like, you come in and everything can be done conversationally. So it's not just like conversational app building at one little point in the journey. It's like, no, every single thing that previously would've required, like, well, in their case is like writing code, you know, and inspecting code, you can now just do conversationally, right? And so I think we had to like rethink the entire product paradigm. Like we literally changed the entire layout of our product, like the informational architecture to say like, look, like conversational is the default. And like, it's almost like ChatGPT where like you just have this massive chat bar now. And that's the main way that you interact with Airtable. And we literally decomposed our components into little bits and pieces that now we can inject into the chat experience so that you get these artifacts, these fragments, as you're interacting with what we call Omni, our new agent that does it all. But you could ask it data questions, you could ask it to build out a report, and it will preview like, here's that fragment that I created for you with these now disembodied no-code components. And also let me show you right next to it, just like with Cursor, you have the agentic composer, and then next to that, still the IDE. We've kind of blended both, but we had to rethink the entire paradigm and the experience overall, and then actually do the heavy lifting of making an agent that actually works to do everything that, literally everything that required point and click and keyboard before, you can now do just through conversation.
Do you, when you hang out with the young founders that are building in this space right now, Do you ever think like, oh man, I don't have what they have? Maybe I have experience and I know things that they don't and I have company-building battle wounds, but I don't have that energy. Do you think that?
I mean, look, I think there's definitely an energy deficit that I have compared to these young upstarts who literally can just throw everything at their company, right? To some extent, I think when you're a first-time founder and when you don't have experience, that's what you have to do. That's what I did, right? I had no experience. I didn't have wisdom. I didn't have credibility. So all I had was sweat. And as much sweat as I could output was the success of the company. I do think that with experience, you can make better decisions, right? And I think one of the things I've learned in actually giving advice Uh, whether it's product strategy or go-to-market strategy, you know, like for some of these companies that, you know, a common question is like PLG versus like enterprise. How do we think about that? Like, how do we think about use cases versus horizontal platform positioning? Airtable obviously have to solve a lot of that, you know, in Sturdy, right? Like we're horizontal product, general purpose, but also we have to do, think about like use cases and use case marketing and templates and eventually solutions. So I think like, As I've talked to a lot of these founders and given them advice, I think what I've learned is actually you can make decisions that actually save you a lot of rework. Maybe you would've gotten there by trial and error if you didn't have the wisdom, but there's some instinctive judgment calls that I think I can make differently than I would if I were 20 and just working really, really hard, but figuring everything else out from scratch. I do think the most critical knowledge gap that I need to make sure I never allow to exist or grow is the technical one, which is all of the stuff that's happening in AI. There's no substitute for actually being hands-on with it and understanding how it works at a technical level. This is not something like let's say in the SaaS world, there was a lot of concepts that you didn't need to technically understand and how integrations work. Maybe you don't actually need to understand literally how an integration with this kind of partner works at a technical level to be able to say at a strategic level, we need to build an integration with Salesforce, right?
Yeah.
I think now the way things work technically actually is profoundly important on how you think about the product and even the business, right? And so as an example, with integrations, if you actually understand how MCP works and what a successful MCP server implementation looks like and why that's different from a naive one that just thinly wraps a REST API, then you actually understand how do you build a truly different and magical product experience powered by MCP, where in Airtable you could actually have really smart agents pull in intelligently just the right summary or insight from any other system out there like Salesforce, et cetera. And that kind of technical ingenuity and insight can actually shortcut you what would've been a much heavier lift to build a different kind of implementation. And that wouldn't actually deliver on the customer need nearly as well. So to me, it's like the bigger risk than not working hard enough or fast or long enough is actually to get technically obsolete or technically abstracted away from the details such that you're making decisions on a kind of a very zoomed out or summarized understanding of what's actually happening at the technical level.
Yeah. That makes sense. When founders, when you're talking to some of these younger founders and they ask for Howie's advice on, hey, how do I manage my life while I build a company?
Don't.
You can't. What do you say?
I mean, look, I think it is an all-out sprint in the early days, and I think until you've found product-market fit, it should be an all-out sprint. It's not like A marathon, you got to pace yourself. It's like you have a very fleeting moment of time before you either run out of funding or, I mean, nowadays you can raise so much funding upfront, maybe that's not even the constraint, but it's like you run out of patience or your team runs out of patience, right? You can't go and spend 5 years finding the right product-market fit. Nobody would join your company in today's era, right? They would just join some other company that's already found it. So I think It has to be an all-out sprint. You have to move so, so fast. And like, I mean, to some extent, like, especially if you're coming in as a, like, relatively inexperienced founder and all you have is speed and maybe like, you know, technical acumen, you know, there is no balance. I think like, you know, you just got to go all out and, and keep iterating until you find that product-market fit. I think once you have it, then you can kind of like change into a little bit more of an endurance sport. And by the way, like, you know, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Like, guess what? Marathons are like intense. I've never run one, but like, I, you know, I did like the 400-meter and the 800-meter dash or, you know, run distance poorly at one point. And like, you know, the longer you go, like the longer the distance, it's just like more grueling intensity of speed for an even longer stretch. So I think it is accurate to call it like it becomes more of a marathon than an all-out sprint. But like, that still means you're like giving it your all and it's still like very, very intense.
Yeah. And what's the— what are the like subtle distinctions between a marathon and a sprint? Like as you live your life in a marathon, which is probably what you're doing now, like what does that practically mean?
Well, look, I mean, first of all, interestingly, like the Olympic marathon runners, like run each of the 100 meters faster than I can run 100 meters.
Right.
I mean, so like, you know, first of all, like somebody moving really fast, even in the marathon mode is still, um, moving faster, like on a per chunk, like on an every week basis, they're probably doing more and getting like more done than like a, like non-fast person, like an average sprinter, like a pit.
Yeah.
And like, you know, to bring it back to like companies, like Like the average person at the average big company is operating like even in what they call like a sprint, like far slower than what a like high-intensity startup founder or startup team is doing on a regular basis all the time. Right. And so, I mean, like you think about Cursor and Windsurf, it's like, you know, for the entire year span, like they've maintained an insane pace of execution intensity. So it's not just like, okay, we got to go and sprint for 3 months to figure this out. I mean, it's been well over a year, right? Years actually. And before they even launched the IDEs, they were already working really hard. And so you have to be able to maintain this really, really intense pace of execution for years on end. And I would say for me though, it's actually really fun. And I've realized I think there's a difference between like, you know, the time constraints you have and the energy constraints you have, right? So meaning like, you know, you'll never get more than 24 hours a day, right? And you need some time to sleep. And so like, there's only so many more hours you can literally work. Um, and at some point, like you kind of start to plateau, whether that's at 8 hours, 12 hours, or 18 hours per day. But there's also energy of execution, right? Where if you're low energy and you're kind of like taking your time about doing something, you might just actually spend the same chunk of time doing 10 times slower work. And especially if you're doing a lot of work that is not actually the most impactful stuff. So you're working slower, the velocity of your literal clicks and execution is slower. But then on top of that, you're working on the suboptimal things that are not highest impact. You're just going through activities. I think the biggest culprit of this is You just take a bunch of meetings for the sake of taking meetings, and everybody has these rituals where we have weekly recurring things that we all just do, but all kind of, in our heart of hearts, know is not actually the thing that's going to really move the needle. Why do you keep doing it? Right? If you threw all that out and just did the right things—
Have you been able to throw it out?
I've been pretty radical in, I've canceled all my standing one-on-ones. I've canceled most of my previously recurring weekly meetings. And on the one-on-ones front, I now believe anything important and worth talking about, we shouldn't wait a week to talk about it. Ping me right now and either I'll give you an instant response on Slack or I'll schedule that day, sometimes even within the hour, hey, let's get on a quick call right now. And because you're clearing out all of the standing time that was just allocated by activity rather than topical urgency, you can make more time last minute to get on for those things, right? I just imagine if you're a 5-person startup hustling product-market fit, it's not like you have all these recurring meetings all day.
Yeah.
At any given moment, you're jumping on whatever is the most important thing to unblock at that moment. So just in how I manage my calendar, absolutely, I kind of blew up all of the recurring things that are not actually every week driving meaningful progress. I also now block out time for actually getting hands-on with our own product. And every week we should be dogfooding or shipping new features that are pretty significant. And the only way to really get a feel for them and figure out where we need to go with them is to use it yourself—
Yeah.
In addition to getting customer feedback. So I spend a lot of time doing that. And then also trying out other companies' products, right? So all these startups, I try to sign up for every single one. And I probably contribute maybe, I mean, well in the thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars back to the early stage AI native because I'm just willing to upgrade immediately. They're like, $200 a month? Sure, whatever. I'll pay. I want to try out every single product that comes out and really get a feel For it and understand, like I try to squint and see the good and the potential in it, almost like an early stage investor versus dismissing it as like oh this is like not very good.
Yeah, gimmicky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, courtesy of you, all these companies' revenues are going up, and then we're paying nosebleed prices because yeah.
I never turn to like I never cancel. Just like whatever. Like I haven't used this product for like eight months, but like you know, like I'll just. keep it on the credit card. I'll go back to it. Like, I want to be able to like periodically check in every once in a while and like see what's new.
It is pretty mind-blowing that you can now just like, like I could go and take a screenshot of Airtable's homepage and a bunch of product screens and then basically just input that screenshot into one of these tools and it just like goes and builds it.
For sure.
Now it's not like it, but you know what I mean? Like, no, it's like insane.
For sure. I mean, one thing I've done now is like, because You can build a website so trivially. Like, I'll sometimes create a microsite just to like express an idea, right? So like, you know, I have like all this stuff about like vibe coding versus like no-code, uh, or the fusion thereof. Like, you know, instead of going and like writing a blog post or an ebook or something about it, like I actually vibe coded a microsite. Now I had to like go and like do some research ahead of time with like deep research, curate it, add my own thoughts. Like there's some like— kind of multi-step prompting that went into this.
Yeah.
But then I take the context that I want to give a product like Replit into Replit, and then I have it generate a microsite for me. And for that, it's profound. It's like, wow, this perfectly shows in almost like a content page where you scroll down and you just learn about the concepts and there's little quotes embedded. It's like actually a better representation of those concepts, the ideas that I'm sharing with the team for their sake, um, than like a traditional internal, like messaging doc, right?
Yeah.
So I just think it's, it's really, I think what's cool is like it allows you to work more directly with a more powerful medium than what most of us had before, right? Like before you might do that in docs or slides or whatever. And now you can like actually build not only a website, but like an interactive prototype of a concept, right? Uh, I think that's really, really powerful.
Um, when founders ask you about help with like how to structure the cap table up front, like how did you learn anything from like, or things that you were like, I, now that I'm 10 years into Airtable, I wish I did a couple of things differently on the like foundation of the house.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, one, I think the most important thing is find the people and the structure that allows you to move with the most autonomy and agility, right? So I think there's much greater downside from creating drag potentially on decision-making. One example of this is I do think founders should try to, as much as possible, retain board control, especially in the early product-market fit finding phase.
Yeah.
You got to do it yourself. Sure, you should surround yourself with really smart people, and some of those could be investors, board members, but ultimately you're not going to get to product-market fit by committee. And therefore, the best way to get there is to allow yourself to move as quickly as possible. So board control, I generally think don't over-optimize for sensational valuation. Just optimize to get the right people as efficiently as possible that you want involved. involved, and then more importantly, be able to get back to work. And I think as with the big game hunting exec ego trip that we talked about before, I think there can also be an ego trip for especially first-time founders with the whole—
I want China on my cap table. Yeah.
And I think there's almost this— I mean, there is this ego flattery of you went from being kind of a nobody. I mean, I was nobody before I started my first company, and even then, to some extent, But you suddenly have the attention of all these VCs, especially if you have a hot round. You're like, whoa, this is really cool. And I want to take all these meetings because it's a form of flattery. And I think you can over-optimize fundraising. You can over-optimize for valuation. You can over-optimize like, oh man, but I need to talk to every single possible investor and be comprehensive in my search. And I think instead, the goal should be find somebody great. There are multiple great people to work with. Get clean terms, most of all from a structural or control standpoint, and then freaking get back to work as quickly as possible. Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, that's fair. Also, like from the ego perspective, it's like nobody was giving you attention. Now all of these people that maybe you deem as important or something in your industry totally are showering you with attention, and you're like, okay, I kind of want this to last as long as I can.
Yeah, it's like let's let's milk this fundraising cycle to be like. 6 months instead of a 6-week closing process, right? I mean, for sure, there is some of that.
And then you rationalize it with like, well, we want to get to know them for the next round.
Right. Or like, oh, we got to really exhaustively consider all the options and optimize for the highest possible valuation. You can always come up with some justification for spending time on the wrong things. And I think that is absolutely one of the wrong things.
Yeah. I was talking this with of my partners internally yesterday, actually. And interestingly, how you fundraise tells you a lot about the person that you are.
Yeah.
You know, like what you say, is that what you want to do?
Yeah.
You know, like, like how much information do you feel like you want to give upfront? Like, especially in these days, like, yeah, people are fairly maybe non-collaborative about the information that they want to share. And it turns out like they're just not that collaborative with like, you know, like as, as founders, you know? And so like it does, I think there's actually kind of like There's data points that you can learn just even in the fundraising process mutually.
Oh, totally. I mean, like, for me, a few anti-patterns of founder style are one, like barking louder than the bite, right? I mean, like, you know, there are some founders who come in and they just like, they talk the big game versus having a certain amount of humility and like starting first with like, here's what we actually have, right? Like when they overplay the like vision and like all the stuff that's not actually substantive. It's all talk, right? And so I think that's one anti-pattern. I think another is getting too aggressive with, again, the optimization of the wrong things, right? It's almost like it becomes this game or power play dynamic where it's like, oh, I need to fake it till I make it and I have to show that I have the upper hand. So I'm going to make everybody beg to get to talk to me or work with me. And to be honest, unintentionally, I think I gained a reputation for a little bit of this back when I was first raising money, not because I actually wanted to play the game, but just because ironically, I was actually just trying to stay heads down and focus on my work and building the product. And so I would literally respond to a lot of inbound investor interest and say, hey, really sorry, heads down with execution, which was true, Um, like, you know, can we take a rain check on, on meeting up, especially if we're not raising a round right now? And the, the, the like weird thing that I learned from that is like, you know, it actually made a lot of the investors want even more to like talk and get involved. And, and I think like there's some founders who then like play into that or like, you know, kind of, they, they, they love unattainability, right? And like, if you play into that, um, intentionally, I think that's also an anti-pattern.
Interesting. Yeah, like you're too cool for school.
Yeah, exactly. Huh.
Crazy. Really crazy.
Yeah, it's crazy times.
It's crazy times. I can't wait to see what, um, how things play out. I'm really excited and I appreciate you doing this.
Yeah, of course. This was fun.
Um, are you hiring?
We are, absolutely. So the interesting thing, we never stopped hiring even during the rifts because my strong philosophy is like, you know, even if you have to radically downsize the company because you're overweight, both in terms of cost structure, but also too many humans, even if each individually is a great person and great even at their job or a skillset, too many people at the wrong time can be counterproductive. But my strong belief was that even if we needed to net downsize, it would be almost hubris to say, yeah, and every single person that we ever need to execute from here, we already hired all the right people. So we never have to hire anybody new. And so I've always believed you should always be hiring because there's always some set of skills or behaviors that you want to bring into the company at any time. So we're always hiring. And it's my belief that that's how you— there's the Ship of Theseus. You got to replace the ship floorboard by floorboard, and eventually the whole ship is different, right? And the way you go from maybe a traditional pre-AI company to an AI-native one is you got to rebuild kind of every single part of your, not just product and business, but actually your organization. Now, that doesn't mean every single person needs to be replaced, but I think it means that culturally you have to start shifting the whole thing towards the new way of operating. And bringing in fresh new eyes is sometimes a really good way to do that.
When you hear the word grit, what do you think of?
Uh, I think of like life. Like, I mean, meaning like, I actually think now that it's the gritty experiences that actually make life life. You know, like, uh, in, in, uh, physics, like equilibrium, you know, is death, literally. Like, you know, an organism or a kind of a colony of any kind of living animals, if it gets into equilibrium where everything is calm and still, everything's perfectly kind of allocated, there is no life. Life is all about kind of entropy and the fact that we're all just fighting to create something and do something interesting. And so I think to me, grit is both the texture of experience along the way and kind of the necessary adversity that makes the journey more than just— I love the WALL-E scene from the movie where there's just all these humans that have had all their needs satiated by perfect technology. They're all sitting in these big hover chairs. They just drink basically Soylent, multicolored Soylent all the time. They just watch TV all the time. And everything theoretically is perfectly handed to them. And yet that is so not a life worth living, right? Obviously. And so, I mean, to me, it's like the texture is what makes life life. It is what makes the journey, the hero's journey, interesting. And so now that's hard to sometimes appreciate when you're really in it and it's really tough going. But I think when you zoom out and reflect on it, it's like— You know, that, that's what made it like interesting and worthwhile.
I love that answer. Thank you.
Yeah, of course.
I appreciate you doing this.
This was really fun.
That's it for now. If you liked the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production, and I'm Juvin. Thanks for listening.
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