Howie Liu On How To Future-Proof Your Company

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Howie, I want to start with talking about fundraising.

Sure.

Who here out here is looking to raise some money? A couple million here and there. Howie, how much has Airtable raised?

We've raised $1.4 billion.

Okay, $1.4 billion raised.

We've kept a billion plus on the balance sheet, and we now generate over $100 million per year of free cash flow. So we can self-fund effectively.

Wow.

So for all these future fundraisers in the audience, give me some of your VC fundraising tips, and give me a warning too.

OK. One is timing. I think there's moments right before or right during an inflection of a company that are optimal for raising. And basically, you should only raise then, and every other time is a horrible time to raise. Because if you're slogging it out, and there's not like a light at the end of the tunnel, You're not going to be able to convince investors to come in right then. So I think timing is everything, either at the very beginning, before you've kind of ground it out, or right when you're about to hit a corner or you're starting to see some inflection. Timing is everything.

When was a good time for you and Airtable to raise? What was the setting, the situation?

Well, we didn't always do this correctly, which is why a lot of this is great advice in hindsight I wish I had gotten. We raised our first round basically a year and a half into working on the product. We had self-funded. It was myself and my co-founder. And we had a prototype. We were going to launch imminently. And I think the inflection at that moment was just saying, look, we've built this product. It works. We have some very early alpha testers. No real traction. No real revenue. But we think that this is going to be big, and here's some of the early proof points. If you're investing now, it's kind of on the promise that it's going to work, right? And then we did another one right after we launched publicly when we actually started getting some early traction. Still not a runaway success, but it was still at a point where you could see the emerging trend, right? I think you want to do it before you've overplayed your hand.

Gotcha. And you mentioned you have $1 billion in the bank still. So many people burn through their cash, burn through the runway. What is your secret for not spending it?

I think more importantly than not spending it is to just raise more than what you need. We spent money when we were an early company. We had a small team. We probably burned, if I had to remember correctly, $1 million plus per year, which is not nothing, but we made sure that we raised $3 million for our first round instead of— we could have raised $1 million or $1.5 million, and that would have meant we had 12 months to figure it out.

Right.

So I think just always anticipating, like, how much are you going to need to get to the next milestone with some extra safety cushion, right? I think too many companies go out, they raise, like, you know, 6 to 12 months of runway, they burn it all very quickly, and then it's like you're giving yourself very little room for error.

Gotcha. So time is money, but money is also time.

Yes.

I love that. And for everyone here, like, you know, Airtable's gone through a lot of pivots, a lot of changes.

Yeah.

From a B2B company— sorry, from a C2B company to a B2B company, to what you're building now. Give me a really quick summary on kind of the evolution of Airtable and also where you're going now.

Yeah, so when we started Airtable back over 10 years ago, it was 2013, really the vision was, let's make app creation accessible to everyone, right? So it's really powerful, obviously, to build apps, whether it's for your business, you know, it could be a CRM app, it could be inventory management, But we wanted to make that really, really easy. And in 2013, that was a really powerful and kind of novel concept, right? Like, app building software was kind of like at its prime, and yet it was very inaccessible. So we picked a really large market, went after it, spent 2 and a half years building the product before launching. Very similar to Figma, actually. And we basically started out with just a product that was great and end users adopting it on their own, pulling out credit cards. There was no sales team. It was a pure PLG, product-led growth company, right? So build a product, people, if they like it, they're going to come, they're going to share it. And it wasn't until maybe 5 years later that we started really seriously going into enterprise and saying, hey, look, we're going to not just let companies adopt us and pull us into larger companies, but we're going to go and more aggressively go and sell this product into larger companies. So Fortune 500, we're going to do these big multimillion-dollar contracts. Get entire pockets of the org on the product. That looks very different as a business, right? It requires a different, uh, you know, type of, um, uh, team, you know, leadership approach to building product and go-to-market. Um, and we're now actually kind of in a little bit of a, you know, pendulum swinging back to our roots, which is, I think, in the era of AI, the best products, in my opinion, in AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude or some of the newer products like Lovable, Replit, etc., They're all working because they're just great products and people love using them and they come in droves, right? It no longer takes many, many years to hit $100 million in revenue with the best AI products. If you can create a self-serve motion where people just experience the magic of your product immediately, you get really, really fast adoption. So we're also now kind of shifting back into this gear of how do we make just really great products powered by AI that are immediately valuable to people who come in and try it.

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I love it.

You mentioned AI because when we did a story together years ago and your whole big pitch was, you know, no-code engineering and making it so simple that, you know, me, I could make some sort of app or some sort of special functional spreadsheet. Now AI comes along and it's changed the entire game on what it means to not to no-code software. Yeah. And you guys are on the forefront of kind of pitching the old way of doing it.

Yeah.

How have you future-proofed your company? How have you embraced AI? And what can everyone out here do? Like, give us— you, you're on the edge of AI right now. Just blow our minds and what do you see happening?

I think what's very, very unique about this moment is it's not just one disruption happening, right? Like, people think of AI as like one thing, like the shift from desktop to mobile computing, Or maybe like, you know, commerce to e-commerce, brick and mortar to e-commerce. You know, but it's not like that. I think it's actually like 3 or 4 different disruptions, each equally big or larger than any of those other ones. The internet, computing, like desktop to mobile. And they're all happening in 10 times faster the time, and they're happening in a very stacked way. So to be very tangible, our core business, like you said, is all about making app creation accessible. And the first version of that was very, you know, kind of UI and user experience driven. We built a really intuitive product, maybe like, you know, Apple puts obsession into how you can use your computer, your iPhone, and we did that for app creation. But, you know, today AI and agents clearly can build apps, right?

Right.

And they can build them pretty well. And so the first layer of disruption for us is how do we take our core product and put AI into it so that anyone coming into Airtable doesn't just have to use the, you know, kind of user interface, but you can talk to our AI, Omni, and have it build an app for you. So there's both agents and like kind of the GUI way to build apps. That's the first level. But really, if you look at like what's actually happening in the world, it's not just that existing things like software are going to be done more easily. It's that, you know, I think that the way that customers interact with services and products is going to change dramatically. And, you know, instead of going to a website, instead of going to like, you know, nike.com, for instance, you're probably gonna go and talk to agents to go and shop for you. And so the very nature of how companies operate is changing. The very nature of like how work is done is changing. The very structure of companies is changing because of that. So, you know, Sam Altman has famously predicted like there's gonna be a billion-dollar revenue business run by one person. I don't think that's just gonna be one company. I think it's gonna be the default. That you're going to have very, very small teams, maybe 1 to 5, maybe 10 people max, that build enormously leveraged companies that generate hundreds of millions, if not billions of revenue, because they're able to be fully agentically leveraged. And so there's so much disruption happening. You know, what we need to do is not only change our current product and business to adapt, but also skate to where the puck is going. So we've launched this entirely new product called HyperAgent, which complements Airtable, but is a completely separate new play. And it's basically a product for everyone to build their own OpenClaw-level agent and use it to run a company, right? Whether it's you each individually going out and creating your own company running with agents, or existing companies going and deploying agents into their workforce. Wow.

Tell me, like, some tactics. So you're the CEO of a unicorn startup, unicorn company. You have tons, you have all You have a whole engineering team, you have millions of customers. How do you suddenly shift to AI while still maintaining business as usual?

So the short answer is you don't maintain business as usual. You know, when apocalypse is coming, right? Like, you know, there's this SaaS-pocalypse, you know, word that's been used, and I think it's not just accurate, it's actually underestimating the amount of disruption that's happening.

So you don't think it's overblown?

I don't think so at all. I think we're in a world where Every single assumption about not just SaaS and tech, but how companies are run, period, what the economy looks like, what the workforce looks like, is completely being disrupted and will look very different, not 5 years from now, 10 years from now, but a year or 2 years from now.

What are you doing tactically in Airtable? It must be tough, because I'm sure you're ripping things out. I'm sure you're getting rid of jobs, creating new jobs. How does that work?

Yeah, so there's this great parallel to when you're in wartime, a lot of the small optimizations of how do you keep the trains running, how do you make this 1% more efficient, how do you make everybody more engaged and more stable in the company, all that stuff doesn't really matter. What matters is winning or losing the war, right?

Right.

And I think the only way to do this in this moment is to actually get hands-on with the most frontier AI experience that you can. Every single person in this room should be going out and experimenting with agents. You should be trying out OpenCLAW or Claude Code. You don't have to be technical to use these products. The whole point is you can go and set up your own OpenCLAW, you can set up HyperAgent. In fact, we're going to do a special code for everyone here to get $10,000 of inference credit to use on frontier models. If you just go to hyperagent.com/30under30, we're going to hook you all up. But you should go out and actually try firsthand modern agents and figure out how to go and build agents that actually do the work that previously would have required you as a human days and days and days, you can do in 30 minutes or an hour and for a fraction of the cost. And so the only way to understand, to even begin to understand not just how this can be applied within your own company, job or within your own company, but also start to extrapolate what does that mean for companies at large? What are the new business opportunities that you could create? As a very simple example, if you work in property management, for instance, you could first start by figuring out how to apply agents to your role, but then you can start to think about what does the future of property management look like, and how could I maybe go out and start an entirely new property management firm that not only runs all internal operations with agents, But maybe the interface to the tenants who want to request different services, have complaints, have feedback, whatever, can all be done with agents as well. And so only by going and using agents at the frontier can you even begin to understand— it's like having the vocabulary to describe what's possible. Much like it would be very hard to build a great internet business if you had never actually used the internet or weren't internet fluent yourself.

You mentioned like during times of war. Do you consider yourself in a war right now? And if so, tell me about that.

I use that term not necessarily because like you are literally in conflict with other companies, although we are. By all means, like every lucrative market now is in a cutthroat kind of race by a million competitors, by a million smart people. And so, you know, as much as there is massive growth to be gained, like I referenced some of these companies that got to $100 million plus in revenue within like months, within like a year. That used to be unheard of, right? Like there were like, maybe you could count on one hand the number of software companies that got to $100 million within less than a year, let alone like within a few months. And now it's kind of becoming more commonplace, but that doesn't come from nowhere, right? Like it's not like everyone who wants to go out and create that much revenue can just do it because it's cutthroat. It's very, very competitive. So new opportunities are being created as the world changes very rapidly, but you have to be right at the right moment, right place, right moment, to be able to capitalize on it. I think it's absolutely a time where all the traditional rules of, like, you got to be patient, you got to be slow, you got to go and be deliberate, are getting thrown out the window.

Okay.

It's both exciting and, in a way, very Terrifying, but I think the only way to make it through it is to lean in and not to kind of lean out defensively.

Well, you mentioned the speed in which innovation's happening. Every week it seems like there's a new LLM, there's a new tool, there's a new code. How do you, as a CEO of Airtable, stay current in all this? How do you filter the noise? And we have so many founders out here, like, what advice do you have for them to How to keep their eyes on the cutting edge of technology right now?

I mean, I think the only thing that you can do that's important to the business right now is staying at that edge. All of the traditional management techniques and like, here's how you do one-on-ones, and here's how you guide the org, and kind of do all-hands, is secondary now to being at the edge. Because when you have the world changing this fast, and its implications are profound in terms of how it's going to disrupt every business, every business model. The only thing that matters is staying at the edge so that you understand what's happening every single week. Like if there's a new model that comes out, Opus 4.5, for instance, really kind of changed the game. And I think a lot of founders who actually went hands-on and used it were early in realizing we've reached a new level of intelligence where models are not just kind of smart, They're actually capable of doing agentic work that is equivalent to hours and hours, if not days and days, of human work. That's a new era for us. We're in the true autonomous agent era. It's why products like OpenClaw have been able to take off as of late because of these frontier models. I would say if you do nothing else as a CEO except to go and stay focused on what's happening every single week and constantly be playing around with it, immersing in it, and understanding how to translate that into your own business, you couldn't do much better than that.

Last question, with this moving so fast, how do you stay in the know? Are there certain sources, certain websites besides Forbes that you read to get your information? Is there one place you check like, okay, this is what's happening in AI right now? What are your sources?

It's very simple.

What can all these folks use?

It's just X. It's all happening on X. All happening on X. Twitter. You know, it's interesting because X has taken on a new life, which is every major groundbreaking thing in AI is being announced on X and sometimes only on X. As an example, like, there have been updates to Anthropic's products like Claude Code, etc., that are exclusively posted on X by, like, one of the people who worked on the product, and they don't issue a formal blog post. They don't do, like, even like an email sent to all their customers, like, you find out because it's on X. And so, you know, if you're not already scouring X every single week for, you know, all the important AI news, I think that's one of the most valuable things you could be doing, following the right people on there. I personally use HyperAgent to do it for me. So like, I have an agent going and like looking at all of my X feed and then curating a beautiful report of like, here's what I need to know every single day.

Why do you think they're using X for this kind of like Easter egg hunt of features? What's the—

I think the thing, it's just happening so fast, like, you don't even have time to come up with, like, a perfectly marketing and PR approved, like, news release, and, like, to do a formal, like, you know, kind of launch announcement. Like, people are just, like, launching stuff every single day, like, the bigger companies, smaller startups. And so, like, the latency of, like, taking a few extra days or a few extra weeks to go and premeditate a launch moment, is no longer relevant. Like, I think the old days of like you would have an annual event, like Facebook would have F8, you know, Salesforce has Dreamforce, and they would wait for once a year to do the big, you know, mainstage announcement about what are they going to do. It's so out of date now because in a year everything changes like 1,000 times over. So even a month is too long to wait. And I think X is, you know, arguably the best place to enable that real-time-ness to everything happening.

Well, speaking of Time moving fast, we're out of time. Why don't you share that special offer you have again?

Yeah, so for anyone here who wants to try out HyperAgent and go hands-on with agent building at the frontier, hyperagent.com/30under30. We're giving $10,000 of real hard credits, like these are real dollar costs to us as a company that we're paying on your behalf to frontier model providers, i.e., Opus 4.6, 4.7, like these frontier models, so you can get hands-on with agent building. And whether you use HyperAgent or any other product, OpenCLAW, Claude Code, etc., I think there is no better use of your time as somebody who wants to go out and be future-proofed as well as create new companies, new products in this era. Go and get hands-on with agents. There's no other replacement.

Big round of applause, please, for Howie Liu, everybody.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

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