Lessons in Scaling a Low Code Platform with Airtable's CEO Howie Liu

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] I'm Howie Liu. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. We really think of ourselves as this platform that lets anybody come in regardless of industry or use case or company type and basically build their own internal workflows. We're the most meta software product out there because we're the software to build software. I really do believe that, you know, we have 100x+ upside from here. We're never for lack of ideas. There's just such a broad surface area of what we could do in our potential. It feels kind of like we're trying to upgrade an airplane that's in the middle of flying. You should be able to have control over your own software and make it work the way you want.

Uh, Howie, let's just jump into it. I'm gonna, um, Let's just not assume everybody knows what Airtable is, so just give us that like high-level overview.

Yeah, I mean, the, the, the easiest way to put it for this crowd, I think, is we are the bottoms-up low-code app platform. Meaning, you know, bottoms-up, you know, is, is, uh, in our world, you know, meaning that we, we're adopted by business end users. You don't have to be technical, you don't have to be IT, you don't have to be a developer to come in and build useful internal applications. With Airtable. And low-code meaning, you know, you're building these real robust solutions, right? Um, you know, that, that actually empower, uh, you know, business processes within your company.

And so that, when you think about, you know, how broad that can be, like, give me some idea of the scope here because, you know, help me wrap my head around that.

Yeah, I mean, to be honest, like, some of this was, was a little bit of a, um, serendipitous surprise when we first launched the product. We thought this would be initially something that really appealed to more tech startups, you know, kind of you think of these tech-savvier crowds that are able to come in and build, you know, kind of and be earlier adopters on products like this. But what really was incredible was as soon as we launched, we actually saw this enormous diversity of use cases popping up on our table. You know, we had hundreds of signups from, you know, big companies like Honey Nassr, Nike within the first few months, or certainly the first year of, you know, kind of launching as a product. But we also got, you know, literal cattle farmers going out and building cattle tracking applications with Airtable. And so I think the staggering thing to me was just how much there is this distributed amount of what I think of as software creativity in the world. And these people within every company, within every industry, every type of organization are just yearning to go and build software the way that they want it to work. And I think we've been fortunate to be able to provide an outlet for a lot of those use cases.

Yeah, so you had mentioned a broad range of use cases. And I think maybe some of the people that are watching struggle with this. I don't know. I'm curious. I always think it's somewhat of a blessing and a curse to have the ability to do anything for anybody. So when I think about there, there's some really important horizontal solutions. Out there in the world. And as you thought about this, did you think of it as a blessing or a curse? Or as we sort of go into some of the strategic challenges or opportunities that you have, some of the people watching are faced, how do you think about being this horizontal?

Yeah, I think it's, I think of the answer on time horizons, as in, you know, I think this is kind of like a marathon where if you're really good at holding this pace and just having this deliberate focus on being a horizontal platform, platform and trying to serve this massively diverse, you know, total addressable market, then I think in the long term you have more durable advantages. I think you have a bigger market to grow into and an easier path to scale into lots of different use cases. So you don't have this kind of market size risk down the road. However, up front, there's kind of the cold start problem. You know, it is hard to come in and just say, hey, this is a you can build anything kind of platform, right? You can build a cattle tracking app, you can build a video production management system, you can build, you know, a way to orchestrate, you know, kind of your entire global marketing process, right, around launching new products. And that just, you know, the fact that we're a horizontal platform, we're serving all these different use cases, I think did make it harder initially to get that running start. You know, notable examples of this included, you know, when we went out and raised our first few rounds of funding, a ton of the investors out there, you know, they would basically give us the feedback of, hey, we think you're really, you know, you've built this really cool product. It's clearly required a lot of product talent to go and create something that's so powerful yet so usable. And yet we think your entire business plan is fatally flawed by the fact that you haven't picked a single vertical to just very crisply define here's the exact target use case, target persona, target company, and here's your go-to-market sales strategy to go and land those customers repeatedly. Right. Which I think to their credit, like there was some validity to that. Right. Because I think build it and hope that customers come is generally not a very viable viable, you know, go-to-market strategy. Like, I don't think, you know, you should ever put in your business plan like, we're just going to build it and hope that people come. Um, but I think in our case, like, we, we did, you know, it required some amount of effort. I think we really tried to study some of the early adoption that we got, um, understand how people were using us, build product improvements to better serve their needs. Also doing things like creating templates that really created this balance of like being able to suggest and give people kind of a launch-off point for specific use cases, yet not bind ourselves to any one vertical. Um, those all helped, but I think we also frankly got a little bit lucky, right? Because every time a new company is launched, there's a little bit of the die being cast. And did you roll a lucky kind of product-market fit or did you not? And I think we did kind of just start seeing organic pickup. And, you know, in addition to the hard work of everybody on the team, part of that was luck.

Well, let me ask you, it's maybe a little bit of an aside, but I know like major motion pictures plan their movies on you, but then also you have this cattle thing? Like, can you— what?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting things is like, totally. I mean, I think one of the things is, you know, that, that we are trying to now navigate is it's, it's a valid point that we should start, you know, defining not the use cases that we exclusively want to be built on Airtable or, or, um, that we want Airtable to be exclusively used for, um, but at least what are the highest value use cases that for us as a business are the strategically most important to make sure that we continue to build product improvements for, that we're serving 100% well, and that we then also start, you know, kind of building these increasingly, you know, kind of specific go-to-market efforts to get out to the market for. So while at the same time we want to maintain this completely flexible, you know, product experience for anybody to come in, you know, for the cattle farmers to be able to come in and use, we're not necessarily going to go and spend a ton of effort just given the, the, you know, kind of likely size of the cattle farming or the cattle tracking, you know, kind of use case vertical in comparison to something much bigger like, you know, we can land, you know, every marketing team in the world. That's a much bigger vertical and also a strategically advantaged place to then expand to other parts of the enterprise. Um, so, you know, there's this combination of like trying to keep the core product experience as intuitive and flexible as possible so that we can support all these long-tail use cases like cattle farming. Um, but then, you know, starting to layer on these kind of vertical prongs of product and go-to-market specialization so that we can do a really good job of going after the high-value use cases.

So I think— I'm thinking of this as these are some of the strategic decisions that you had to make. So horizontal platform that can do anything, how do you maintain flexibility and still be able to have an ease of use for an obvious market? And templates were one way that you did that. And it sounds like, you know, you continue to explore that and there's just so many things that people in these different areas are doing with Airtable. So do you find, I know that another sort of strategic question that people have on this road to scale is, is it bottom-up adoption or top-down enterprise sale? And, or is it, is it one or the other? Is it both? And is it, you know, how did, how did you think of You know, one is this horizontal versus vertical, and I think that would be helpful. Like, you want to be flexible yet easy for the biggest use case. The second is like, what's your— how do you think about bottom-up versus top-down?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a great question and obviously a very challenging question. You know, I think on the product side, you know, I think it's foundational to build a horizontal product, as in, you know, it's really hard. And part of the reason why we chose to go down this horizontal route and commit to it rather than starting with a vertical and then trying to make it more horizontal over time. It's like, I think it's just foundational that the product experience, you know, it's, it's in our core DNA as a product to try to take all of this complexity, all of these things that you can do with the Lego pieces of Airtable and distill them into these really intuitive pieces, right? To give an example, like, you know, in Airtable you have a few different primitives, if you will, right? Field types. Um, you have, you know, different types of views. We now have things like Airtable apps that you can add on top of an Airtable database. Um, there's collaboration features. And all of these features have to be designed in a really elegant way that doesn't require, you know, reading a support article to figure out, right? That anybody can come in and just intuit how they can piece them together to build the solution in their mind, not a solution that we've already prescribed, right? So I think on the horizontal product side, I think that's just foundational. And like, we made a real commitment as a company when we first started to always put this rigorous focus on, on making that product experience intuitive. And continuing to build more power into the product without diluting or without like kind of tainting the elegance of that onboarding experience. So I think that that's just core. On the go-to-market side, I think it's really interesting. You know, we hired our CMO earlier this year. She's incredible. She— her name is Archana Agarwal. And before Airtable, she was at Atlassian, where she basically helped lead marketing for a lot of their— all of their cloud versions of their products. Right. And Atlassian is sort of famous, or maybe some people would call it infamous, for being like very, you know, bottoms-up oriented, right, for a very long period of company, even past, you know, IPO. And at the point they were at hundreds of millions in revenue, like the adage was like no salespeople, right? And, you know, I think that— and then, you know, perhaps somewhat in contrast, you know, we just had our CRO start, Seth Shaw, whose background was actually in kind of a more hybrid sales environment. Starting with LogMeIn, where he was head of worldwide sales, but also worked at companies like Wrike and Envision that saw like kind of more of a hybrid approach. And so I think it's— I wouldn't call these competing philosophies so much as, you know, there's kind of good parts of each of those experiences that we want to fuse together into like, you know, the perfect setup for Airtable. I think that, you know, the bottoms-up engine, there's no question it's very high efficiency, right? Like your unit economics are just going to look awesome if you do bottoms-up.

That are listening, you started in bottom-up, you had that adoption.

For sure. Yeah, I mean, we really didn't do much in the way of outbound sales and marketing, um, you know, before this year. Even now it's still kind of early days, experimental efforts. And so, you know, the scale that we got, like, I mean, you know, uh, early on and even to this day, like, you know, we get thousands of— many thousands of organic signups per day, and some percent of those convert through the funnel into active users. And then some of those people just pull out a credit card without literally ever talking to a person at Airtable, right, sales or support, and just start paying us, right? And sometimes they'll add more seats and it'll expand. Um, and then sometimes they'll actually reach out to sales and we'll engage with them in more of a reactive and consultative way. But I think there's so many opportunities to now layer on top of that high-efficiency bottoms-up motion also this increasingly proactive enterprise sales motion where I like to think of it as additive in value, right? We're not just trying to like get our customers to pay us more money and use sales as the way to kind of extract that from them, but quite the opposite. I think sales has this opportunity to actually be proactive and presenting ideas for how these customers can make more, you know, make more use of Airtable, build new use cases, or even expand to new teams within their enterprise who could genuinely, you know, get value out of building on Airtable. So that's a big push for us right now. And I think that, you know, there's kind of a, a new S-curve to be built on top of the existing S-curve if we can do both. So they're not competing so much as, I think, additive.

So what advice would you give to founders out there that start in the bottom-up world or start in the top-down? Like, how long— people are like, do they have to do both? Is there a time clock? Like, how do you think about that? Or what would you tell people who are watching to think about that?

Yeah, I mean, well, so there's a great post. I think it came out recently from Andreessen Horowitz on their blog about exactly this topic. I forget the name of the exact article, but I think if you search for bottoms-up Up, Top Down, you know, the $20-30 million ARR, you would probably find it. David George is one of the authors. And, you know, I think it puts it really well, which is, look, like, bottoms up is great. Like, if you can get a bottoms up growth engine going, fantastic. You've just gotten this like free source of like, you know, it's like a spring that's just shooting out like free delicious water, but you don't have to bother excavating out of the ground, right? And you should take it. Like, there's no question you should take it and you shouldn't try to ignore it or suppress it. But at the same time, it's, you know, it's probably not enough. In most cases, to provide durable growth for the next 10 years, right? If your aspirations are to become a billion-dollar-plus revenue business, like, it's very unlikely. Even Atlassian, um, has layered in like real sales at this point, um, you know, getting to a billion and beyond in revenue. And so I think, um, you know, it's sort of a matter of when rather than whether you, you take this bottoms-up engine and not just replace it or, you know, build a completely separate sales engine, but I think the best models are really synergistic, where your salespeople are actually leveraging the bottoms-up adoption within an existing account. For us, for instance, we have like literally tens of thousands of companies out there who already have a 5 or greater seat workspace that's active on Airtable. And so that's a great seed of adoption that a salesperson can reach out and say, hey, like, can we help you get more value out of Airtable? Can we talk about like how to set up Airtable better, how to deploy it? To other use cases. And so leveraging that bottoms-up kind of capability of the product rather than just saying, hey, we're going to build a completely different top-down only or outbound only sales engine that is totally separate. Right. So I think it's figuring out and it's a whole new world. Right. I think none of these hybrid models, I think, really existed in practice. Call it 8 years ago, at least certainly I wasn't aware of them. And so I think there is kind of this really exciting kind of renaissance. And this conference is a great venue to kind of probably learn about it. Um, but, uh, but of these hybrid bottoms-up, top-down SaaS models, I think that's the future. I think the companies with the best unit economics are going to have this. I mean, Datadog is a recent example that I think has, has done this well, right? They have a bottoms-up activation funnel. If you're a tech startup, you want to adopt Datadog, you can do so by yourself, but you can also talk to a salesperson and they can also layer on these, you know, kind of higher and higher enterprise, uh, you know, kind of touches.

Yeah, I, I think of it too as a when, not an if. And in a way you're trying to build a giant burger with two big buns, bottom up and top down, and forget the beef.

Totally.

You gotta like something about that. Cause I do, I think this is the future. So as you think about too, one of the things that always impressed me about Airtable is, um, something that I think a lot of people can learn from who are watching is how do you think about the category? Because it isn't, You know, it's like something, but not, it's really different. So how did you think about category creation and how would you advise people who are watching to think about categories and how to fit and how to talk about it and how to exist and what's really different?

For sure. Well, I mean, first I wish we had thought more clearly about it earlier, you know, 'cause I think for a while we had convinced ourselves that, yeah, of course we're a completely different product from anything else out there. And it should be obvious to everyone out there out there, investors and customers alike. And so like we almost just assumed it was a given that we were in a different category, right? Um, and I think we pitched ourselves often to both customers and investors as, you know, we're a software creation platform that anyone can use. Of course that's a new category. Of course nothing else out there exists like it, right? And while that, you know, that, you know, maybe that's not untrue, right? We still do think of ourselves as a software creation platform that anyone can use. Um, I think, you know, real category definition means that you've you've been very explicit about what are your alternatives. You know, the reality is like not everybody in the world has heard of Airtable, or even the ones who have heard of Airtable aren't using it. And so if they're not using Airtable, they're clearly getting by, they're surviving in life, in work life without Airtable. So what are they using? What are we actually coming in and competing with and replacing? And how are people thinking about the value of Airtable with respect to those alternatives? Right. And so one, I would just say, you know, we're, we're starting to get much more crisp about that. I think going into the next couple of years, especially as our category heats up and And we're starting to see more products that are truly coming after this category, as opposed to, you know, always before there were project management tools that we didn't really think of as competitors. And then there were top-down low-code platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce AppCloud that are, you know, powerful but more heavyweight, IT adopted, that we also didn't think of as competitors. But we are now starting to see, you know, direct competition. Microsoft has a product called Lists that is in many ways like a direct you know, kind of attempt to replicate Airtable. We think we have a lot of product advantages over that product. But, but, you know, it's a much more direct play against Airtable. Google has a product called Tables, and even Amazon just launched something called Honeycode, which is their closest approximation to the space. So I think we have to get crisper about like, what is this category? Why are we poised to be the leader in it? And realistically, who do we compete with? Right. And so as, as we go over the next year, I think those are important questions. And I have to give a shout out to Karen herself, who I think has, has helped us as well as many companies, including Facebook and Salesforce in the past, think about these exact questions.

It's— I mean, it's exciting. And we talked about needing to ground people on something they already know, because it's hard to be like— you get— you only get the ability to explain like one new thing. You can't explain 20 things. So there's always this idea of grounding that's important when you think about category creation.

And that's exactly right. I mean, like, the software creation pitch that I described earlier was faulty because I think it's not obvious to the average customer, to most customers, why do I need to create software in the first place, right? It's not a need that's burning in their minds. Now, if they actually figured out, wait, if I could build my own software, that means I can, you know, build this workflow in this much more structured, transparent, collaborative way, like that would be the value, the benefit, right? Um, you know, maybe I can get even more, you know, content produced if that's my job, or build product better with greater visibility into the progress within. But, you know, just saying, hey, we're a self-creation platform, that wasn't enough because it's not clear that people need that in the first place.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's one of the things I love working on the most. I mean, this idea of how do you, how do you create and, and own the category, or, you know, be in an existing category and win. It's really, it, it's both for everybody. It's fun, it's really hard when you're living it. So I would love to go on to some of the challenges and bumps in the road, but almost before we do that, I learned from you in all kinds of different ways that are not just Airtable. So I'd love to like break it up and shake things up a little bit and do almost a rapid fire in the middle. A little bizarre going in the middle. Yeah.

I don't know if I can handle it.

I'm going to ask you. I know. I mean, but we're going to get to the bumps in the road. So just be prepared. Next are some of the challenges that you faced. -based. So let me just ask you a string of rapid-fire questions. What's the worst advice you ever got?

You know, this is a little bit easy and maybe unfair, but, you know, I think the— there were so many loud voices, especially from some of the investors that we pitched that just felt adamant about the fact that we had to go vertical, right? It was like, you will not— it was a definitive statement of you will not succeed unless you go vertical and pick a specific use case. And I think it came from a good place. It wasn't malintent by any means, so I don't want to be rude about it. But I think the net is, I think as a founder, sometimes you just have to trust your own instinct, right? Like take advice, but also at the end of the day, if you really feel instinctively strongly about something, I think sometimes you have to just go for it.

Okay, what's the best advice?

This actually I got from Mark from Facebook, who I think is an incredible leader. But it was, you know, we had just seen Microsoft launch their competitor, and the kind of advice basically was, you know, that we tend to overestimate competition in the short term. We get really freaked out about it, but we underestimate in the long term. So, you know, calm yourself down in the short term, but then like be more paranoid in the long term about what this really means over the next 5 years, right? Even if their product right now does or doesn't, you know, impact our, our growth.

That's— I, I think most people miss that. I think they get really freaked out in the short term and then forget about it. And that, especially if it's a— especially if it's a big competitor. It's best not to forget about it. Do you have a book that helped you as a founder?

Yeah, so this year in particular, I got really into Jim Collins, and the best— I think my favorite book of his series is Great by Choice, which is much more oriented towards high-growth startups than, you know, some of the older, more traditional companies. But it's an excellent book that talks about, you know, ultimately what are actually like some of the consistent patterns of companies that become great you know, even in the face of competition, even when there are other companies that look the same on paper but one became a breakout success and the other didn't, you know, what, what, what was it that made them successful?

Yeah, he's phenomenal. I couldn't agree more on his writing. Um, what's your current stress reducer that you can discuss in public?

Yeah, so long drives. Um, you know, I think especially these days there's no traffic and, um, and, you know, if you ever need to go somewhere, uh, you know, I love driving. So I think it's, it's just the right amount of mental engagement, but you can really kind of clear your mind.

Tea or coffee?

Coffee, definitely, and iced, and multiple cups a day, which I've convinced myself is not bad for health. I think there was a study that showed it actually is linked to a reduction in heart disease risk, so I'm gonna keep drinking lots of coffee.

Yeah, you can find a study any which way.

True. Well, I've— it makes myself, uh, it makes me feel better about about it.

So I'm a big caffeine person too. So I look for the studies that make me feel better. Okay. Do you have a current TV show or podcast that you—

So I just, yeah, I just discovered the A24, the film distribution company's podcast. And it's really cool because they interview a lot of these creators, producers, actors, and it's a very candid discussion of a very different industry, but yet, you know, I think there are some like inspirational, you know, kind of patterns or leaps of creativity that, that apply even to, to tech and to SaaS.

That's awesome. I didn't know about that. They're incredible on a very different group.

I love that.

They make some creepy movies too. For sure. Okay. So let's go back to the hard stuff. Um, so as you're thinking about some of the lessons that you've learned and the bumps on the road, you've been a CEO and a co-founder for how long now?

Well, you know, I'm, uh, I've been working on Airtable for about 8 years. I will say in the early days, you know, even if you're called CEO, it doesn't really feel like being a CEO, right? Because in truth, you're just kind of— you're there maybe coding initially, or maybe you're taking sales calls, like whatever it is, and you're just doing anything it takes to, to get from zero to one, right?

So yeah, everything, like— so, but how has that changed? How do you think about that?

I mean, I think there's For me, it's felt like there were these really qualitative shifts in the role every, call it, 18 months, right? I don't know why it ended up being 18 months, and maybe for some companies it's even faster or slower, but for us it was roughly every 18 months, I would say. Um, for Airtable, you know, earliest days, I was literally there, you know, coding and like thinking about product stuff, like in the weeds along with, uh, my co-founders and our early employees. Um, at some point after that, I think it shifted into, okay, like I need to go out and hire because we're not— we're never gonna, you know, execute against the broader opportunity that we think we can with 4 people in a room or 5, right? And so a lot of my priorities shifted to figuring out how to hire and then like how to align all these great people that we had put in the room and like how do we figure out like what everybody's working on and so on. And then you kind of transition again and again maybe to a manager of managers, which is a different skill set, trying to figure out how to hire your first kind of early leadership team within the company that's still very scrappy and like able to adapt, etc. But a lot of that time you're also still kind of literally the chief plumber. Like I remember distinctly there was a point where I plunged the toilet of our shared restroom because we had one restroom, we had one toilet, and sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and literally plunge the toilet, right? So I think like early days it was really just unblocking whatever needs to be blocked. Horrible unintentional pun there, but unblocking whatever needs to be unblocked. To keep the company running, right? And then like, I think as you get later, and for me, it's been palpable like over the past year, especially you get to this point where I think we're still very early and we're still very much like the David in this kind of like battle, especially against a Microsoft-sized Goliath. But we have, it now feels like we have like a pretty like sizable comparatively amount of resources to like certainly early days, right? And so, you know, we've raised some funding, we have a few hundred million in the bank of cash that we can deploy. Right towards, you know, hiring or marketing or whatever we want to do. And we also, I think, have the ability now to hire really, really great people across the board, whether it's individual contributors or execs. And so I think it becomes a challenge for the CEO to like, you know, really ultimately figure out it's not just about working hard at this point. It's not just about throwing yourself full body at every toilet that needs to be plunged, either physically or metaphorically. But it's about figuring out how do you get the most leverage? How do you do the things that only you can do? Because everything else that you can hire for, and in fact hire somebody who can do the job better than you at, which I think at this point, you know, most jobs within the company can be done better by somebody else. Like, you know, our CMO is much better at, you know, every part of marketing than I am right now. I can still partner with her to think about, you know, particularly tricky part of, you know, the messaging of some new product feature or how we position the product, right? But likewise, the same would go for, you know, many of our other leaders. And, and so then I think it becomes a question of of figuring out like, what can I uniquely do? And it's partly hiring the right leadership team, especially building the right cultural practices and standards and like, you know, defining what the culture of the company is, defining are you a performance-oriented culture or not? You know, and there's no right answers to these things, right? But what works for this type of company? You know, I think making the bigger creative leaps that I think sometimes like, you know, a founder CEO can do on instinct, you know, and sometimes that instinct is wrong, but sometimes it's right and you can't prove it. But, you know, that's That's what strategy is, right? You know, making a big bet that we don't just want to compete against project management or productivity tools, but we need to keep pushing into building a platform ecosystem. We need to push into new layers of value that actually unlock additional TAM for us, such as the ability to customize a UI, for instance, on top of Airtable, that kind of thing. So making these bigger creative leaps and resourcing against them. And then finally, I think just simplifying. That was a surprising part of the job this year for me. Was realizing it's not just about saying like, here's all the things we can or could do or should do, but really, in fact, like, you know, I think part of the CEO as well as the exec team's role is to help navigate that almost terrifying expanse of possibilities. I mean, especially for us as a product, like, there's so many different directions we could go in terms of product initiatives and go-to-market. And so I think the job partly is also to take all of that possibility space and distill it and simplify it into a clear set of objectives that everybody can fully align around, get, get behind, understand, and then apply to be more creative and innovative in their day-to-day job, right? Having that context of here's the simplified frame of our strategy, you know, allows every person within the company to be more, more autonomous and then deciding what am I going to work on day to day.

So there are a ton more questions that I have. I'm also looking, and I want to make sure we get to everybody else's questions. We have a number of lined up already in the Q&A section, and I'll remind people they can ask more there. Maybe we should go just to some of the key takeaways and, and just have a sense of, are there— is there something you want to point out here on the key takeaway before I go to some of the audience questions?

No, I think a lot of them are self-explanatory. The investors part is pretty important. I think we were very fortunate to always have at every phase of the company, at every stage of financing, investors that were, one, truly aligned with the goals of the company, saw the massive opportunity to be this really large platform company rather than you know, for instance, being—

I mean, people need to understand it's an actual platform that people are building on.

Exactly. And that's a very different kind of business and execution path than if you just want to be a vertical SaaS solution or a productivity tool, right? And so I think having investors who are very supportive of us basically swinging for the fences with the platform play, being patient with how long that would take, was really, really important. I mean, I think I think with a different set of investors, we may not have made it, right, to where we are today. I think we might have gotten pressured to either sell out early or go down a more narrow path, compete more directly with project management tools. So, so I think that is a really important thing to get right, and just finding people who share both your very human values, cultural values, but also the values of the company and what you're aspiring to become.

That's terrific. So I'm going to jump over to some of the audience questions and I'm going to bucket them a little bit. There are a number of questions that seem focused on the founding. So one is, can you retell me how this idea came to be? And another question is, what was the original use case for Airtable?

Yeah.

So wondering like, how did you come up with the idea and who was like the first person to use it that was outside of your—

For sure.

Or including your friend group, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, so I'll try to combine a few of these questions into one. You know, the— I mean, one, like, you know, the reason why it took a while for us to build the product is because it was actually a fairly hard product to build. You know, this was not something we could hack together an MVP that was working in a weekend. You know, we actually ended up building our own real-time relational database database engine in order to support the type of collaboration experience we wanted on top of it, right? Think about the innovations that were required to build the Google Docs experience. And now instead of just a simplistic, you know, kind of Word document or like a spreadsheet even, which is a simpler data structure than a relational database, imagine trying to build the architecture to kind of support real-time experience on a relational database. And of course, there's just so much surface area to the product itself. We have collaboration features, we support a lot of rapid data entry features, we have to support performance, you know, if you want to put larger datasets into Airtable or larger use cases. So there was just a lot of work to be done to build, I think, the V1 of the product. I think we could have been faster. You know, maybe we could have hired more aggressively.

I'm going to interrupt you. For those that can't see it, one of the questions was, why did it take 18 to 24 months to build? So I think Howie's looking at like, it did take that long, 18 to 20. Is that right? And so it's—

yeah, it was roughly 24 months, um, to Go ahead. Sorry, one second. But it was roughly, roughly 24 months, I think, from, from starting work, you know, on the project to, to, to really actually having a product that was even MVP testable with, with real kind of beta customers. That being said, you know, it wasn't like we just worked in 24 months in a silo or a vacuum of customer feedback. You know, we did try to break it down into, you know, first we went out and to answer the question about the original use case, we tried to very intentionally, because we wanted to go down this horizontal path, you know, it wasn't that we just didn't talk to anybody. We tried to talk to a diversity of potential customers even before we had a product and just even like did empirical or ethnographic studies on how they used spreadsheets for a lot of their workflows, how they use existing tools, right? You know, people who are in product roles, but also people who are in, you know, non-tech roles like nonprofits. How do they do programs management, right? Looking at small businesses, You know, and so we really tried to first understand how people use their existing toolset to do a lot of these use cases. Then we built, you know, kind of some of the early mockups that were not functional, but like could show you what the UX of Airtable might look like, got feedback on those, and so on and so forth. So that, you know, probably every 4 to 6 months, at least, if not more frequently, we were getting some type of validation and feedback. And when we did alpha test the product, you know, we there did also try to get a diversity of different customers using it. So we did have a nonprofit as one of the earliest users of Airtable. I'm thinking like, if we can get this nonprofit to use Airtable for a very complex program management, volunteer management, donor management use case, then we're not just limiting ourselves to tech startups who are using it for a very subset of potential market use cases.

Yeah, no, that's kind of interesting to like purposefully not have a technology company as a first user. I bet gives you some very interesting feedback. Totally. That's a common mistake I see people make is just go from tech company to tech company. One of the questions is like, but wait, how did you even have this idea?

You know, I think it really formed as this combination of two passions, you know, that I drew on. One was, you know, both my co-founder Andrew and I, you know, always had this excitement around, you know, like programming programming. Like we had both learned to program at a medium age, probably in high school for each of us. And I think just felt this like, you know, sense of like excitement and delight from being able to go and just make stuff, right, without having to have any money, without having to have any physical materials. You just go and build something that would do the thing you wanted, right? And that's super cool. And so I think there was this emotional excitement around like, what if you could give everyone that, that same experience without literally having to learn how to write code? Code and syntax and all this stuff, right? And then the second piece of it was I was starting to see, especially when I was at Salesforce, just the explosion of the low-code enterprise market, right? So companies like ServiceNow, companies like Salesforce itself had, had a, you know, an app platform offering called force.com, now App Cloud, that were growing very, very quickly, right? And it was an exciting time because enterprises were sort of adopting this platform. you know, to, to go and build all these long tail, these edge applications as they called it, use cases that were not your, you know, traditional CRM or your ERP use cases, but all of the other application needs within the enterprise that were just being unfulfilled. And so it was clearly like kind of a good time in the market to kind of create that sort of value. And so we just, you know, it almost felt like an intuitive, you know, um, piece of logic of, well, okay, there's clearly this growing need, this, this, this kind of growing market for low code. but also there's this opportunity to, to almost low-end disrupt it and make it something that IT doesn't have to deploy, but a business end user can just go and figure out if it could just be intuitive enough. Um, so that was kind of the thesis, and, and we just started working on it. Um, and a couple years later it, uh, it launched.

As you were saying, it took 18 to 24 months, like, of work because it was totally needed.

It was hard work until, until 4 AM some days. It was the era of, uh You know, overnight coding sessions, for sure.

Nope. So one of the questions is, what do you attribute the bottom-up adoption to? So if we look at it, like, what was it that made people excited and started adopting? And, you know, are there any lessons that people can take from, from what you experienced?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing stuck with me when I read recently about the origins of MPS, and I'm sure we've all heard about MPS, But what was surprising to me was like, where did NPS come from? Is it just some random thing that somebody decided to like slap at the bottom of the screen, say like, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or a colleague, right? 0 to 10. I think we've all seen it, right? And, but what's really interesting, there's an article, I think it's published in HBS by the person who co-invented NPS. And it was actually done while at Bain Consulting. So Bain kind of like invented NPS and originally, It was done for a rental car company. I think— I can't remember, it was Avis or something. And what they actually found was that NPS score actually turned out to be a better empirical predictor of long-term revenue growth for a chain or for a location of rental cars than any other, like, more obvious metric, right, according to this story. So like, you could look at, you know, customer satisfaction scores, you could look at repeat transactions, you could look at volume of transactions, and apparently NPS was the best predictor of long-term growth. And the theory is basically that, you know, the most durable form of customer retention and even customer virality is if somebody likes it so much, you know, loves your product so much that it's not just fulfilling a utility need for them, but they're willing to put their social credibility on the line by saying to somebody else, their coworker or a friend, that this is a product that you should try, you should use it, right? Because that's a different level of social proof.

Proof.

And so I think for us, you know, in some ways, like, this is kind of where we got lucky because, like, you try your very best to build an awesome product and to build great marketing around it, etc. But at the end of the day, you just, you know, you can't guarantee that the customer base is going to react, you know, with a high NPS score to Airtable. You're going to cross that threshold of being somebody, something that is so deeply valuable and also emotionally exciting to a customer that they're willing to go out and talk about it. And I think we were fortunate to get that. Like, if you even go back on Twitter to the earliest days of Airtable's launch, 2015, you see a lot of these people who are actually going on to Twitter and saying not just, hey, this is a fun new product, but wow, this is like totally changing the way I run my business and it's transformative, it's awesome, I'm telling everybody about Airtable. And so I think really, if you can watch NPS and, you know, if you can really put in the, the kind of all-encompassing effort to get the product to a point where it's deeply delightful and deeply empowering to the market, to the customers, then I think that's how you get this viral spread.

Awesome. So when you— so to answer, so that was one of the questions was how did you have this early? The another question that I'm seeing is like, was there a moment and, you know, some anecdotal thing that happened or a stat or something that came to you that said, like, now's the time where you have to have top-down sales?

So we're still not doing, like, true top-down sales where we're going in upfront and without any organic adoption in an account, saying to a CIO or to, you know, an exec buyer, hey, wouldn't you like to buy 20,000 seats of Airtable all at once, right, without trying, trying, uh, trying it within any of your departments? Um, so So like, and I, you know, some companies can do that, like great for them. And, and, um, you know, that's just a different go-to-market model. But for us, really, the, the layering in of any kind of enterprise sales team really was, was a pull. It was, it was a reactive effort because we were seeing all of this viral adoption within enterprises. And sometimes we'd have, even within one account, multiple teams each pulling out their credit cards and paying for Airtable, sometimes substantial amounts for Airtable, tens of thousands of ARR. Per team and multiple teams across the account, to the point where the aggregate value of usage was pretty big and growing. And so sometimes at that point, the teams would actually come to us and say, hey, like, I think we have a lot of people at our company using Airtable. Like, you should probably talk to our IT department or procurement just to like get some kind of officially sanctioned, centralized, you know, kind of deal going on, right? Um, and so a lot of it early on was literally what we call hand raisers, where like our customers had already discovered Airtable, they had validated Airtable, and they just raised their hand and said, hey, we need to talk to a salesperson because we got to get through this. So for us, it was very much pulled into it. But I think that there are opportunities, as I mentioned before, now to become more proactive and to actually step in even before that customer has said, hey, I want to talk to sales, and try to offer a value-add sales conversation earlier. So you're already using Airtable, maybe you're on the free plan, maybe you're a small paid customer, but hey, you know, can we help you get set up even better? And can we help you ultimately expand to other teams that can also get value out of Airtable.

Yeah, yeah. So that also— one of the questions, uh, was a clarification question on what do you mean by horizontal? Do you mean different industries, or do you mean big company, small company, midsize? Are you talking size of company, or are you talking industry when you think about horizontal?

We kind of mean three things all at once, which is size of company. So we, we serve SMBs as well as really large companies, right? Like we have multimillion-dollar ARR accounts, um, with thousands of paid seats, uh, which obviously only happens in very large enterprises. But we also have like literally 5-person SMBs that are only 5 people to begin with, their entire company, and they're using Airtable, right? And so it is both company size, it's also industry. You know, we see the cattle farmers to media and entertainment companies to retail companies to nonprofits to, you know, even like traditional industry companies that you might not expect, right? Travel companies, you know, so many different industries, partly because I think the need for, you know, a custom internal, you know, collaborative application to automate or to better streamline a business process of any kind within any department is sort of universal. It doesn't matter what company you're in. And a lot of these companies are using spreadsheets to try to approximate that right now, which is a very imperfect and messy solution. So, you know, the need is very universal. And then finally, even use case. So it's not just like it's all project management. But in fact it's very different use cases. And sometimes we actually compete against different vertical solutions, you know, for content production type use cases. There are a few dedicated vertical tools that we compete with sometimes, and we win when we do on, on flexibility, on being a more horizontal platform that they can customize to their exact setup.

Yeah, I mean, you had talked about really being clear on what your key differentiators were in terms of the flexibility and elegance and being true to that even as you build other things or, or focus on making certain user cases easier. So, but I would also just make sure people understand their key differences and be very true to them, which—

For sure.

This is another question. When you were, you know, you are building a platform company, like Airtable is a platform. It's not this one-off app. It's not a tool. It's a platform. Platform. So you had given one piece of advice, which was make sure that the people who are funding you are aligned with the vision.

Yeah.

Because you're on a journey together.

Yeah.

Are there other advice, other pieces of advice that you can give people as you think about embarking on, you know, the journey that would be a platform?

Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes it's about figuring out like what are your right metrics. And this is still something that we're struggling with or figuring out now, you know, but I think with a platform business, you really want to resist the temptation to just optimize for the visible short-term metrics like revenue, for instance. You know, obviously we care about revenue. We've been lucky enough to grow our revenue and like we can justify, you know, I think fundraisers, etc., on our revenue. But I think there's also this extra X factor of revenue alone doesn't mean you have a platform business. In fact, quite the opposite. Like vertical SaaS businesses or just, you know, kind of non-platform SaaS businesses can maybe even like do a better job of scaling near-term revenue because there's a clearer sales motion, clearer use case that you're nailing. There's a platform, kind of, it's a chicken and egg, right? You're building this network effect, and that sometimes takes time, but as it builds up, it becomes unstoppable. And so you're kind of, um, I think what's really important, and we're, what we're trying to figure out is what are the best metrics that can capture not just the near-term results, the output of the business, but also these leading indicators of like, what is the size of that network effect? And maybe it's for us, like it could be the number of active applications, third-party applications that have been installed by our customers, or it could be the number of active, you know, kind of solution partners who are actually helping clients implement Airtable, right? You know, or so on and so forth. And, and so I think, you know, figuring out what are the right metrics that capture the beginnings of network effect value and making sure that you're investing into those, because down the road, presumably they're going to pay out out and be visible in revenue, right? They're going to give you more durable revenue growth and a better strategic advantage in the competitive landscape. But in the near term, if you only optimize for revenue, you may underinvest in those things.

Yeah, yeah, that's really, really true. There's this short-term, long-term continual— so I think we've answered these two questions that I see here. I want to ask, um, if you were to go back in time, Howie, me, go back 10 years ago, and you could talk to your younger self, your 10 years ago younger self, what would you tell them? Because you were like about to embark on this. No, it's only been 8, but yeah, yeah, what would you tell yourself? I know I'm like surprised, you know.

I, I think a lot, um, you know, in a way, like even, like even rewinding 2 years feels like an eternity because I feel like I almost cringe at how little I knew a year ago, and I know that I'm going to cringe again in a year when I look back, oh wow, I really didn't know anything. So I think part of it is just stressing the importance of learning as quickly as possible. I think it's the most important skill set that any founder CEO or any founder in general can have, because you don't know everything you need to know to run this business, and you never will. But the only thing you can try to do is just swallow all the knowledge that you can, like a whale streaming through the ocean and just collecting all this water. And I think just trying to learn on a rapid course, I think actively seeking out sources of advice, mentorship, et cetera, is really, really crucial, right? I mean, it's almost like investing in your own personal growth, much like going out and actively soliciting venture investment for capital, right? But your own personal growth, to be able to figure out what it takes to kind of run the company at every next phase is going to be so crucial, right? Because you don't know, like we didn't, you know, I didn't know what it took and I'm still learning. So I think that's a huge part of it. And then I think having the right balance of patience, yet impatience, right? And urgency. I think in some regards, we were correctly patient in building a horizontal business, right? Like we didn't, you know, we resisted the temptation to do something quicker and easier and maybe just switch into being like a project management tool, tool, right? Early on, that could have been like a 6-month effort instead of like a 2.5-year effort to build before launch. You know, at the same time, I think I would have stressed in myself a greater sense of urgency, because I do think even while going after the horizontal play, we could have done things faster, you know, like, and not by like working to 6 AM instead of 4 AM every night, but instead by like putting more focus on how do you get leverage as the founder, right? How do you go So, you know, can you hire 8 more great people so that instead of 4 great people working on this till 4 AM every day, you can hire 8 more people and then maybe you don't have to work till 4 AM, right? Like even working till 1 AM will still get you, you know, kind of faster progress, right? So finding ways to get more and more leverage early on, I think we could have accelerated things. But, you know, it's hard to A/B test the past as well. So who knows?

Right. Well, thank you. I believe our time is up.

Thank you, Karen.

I just wanted to check. Yeah, time flies. You guys got through all the questions, which is great. Thank you both so, so much. Howie, it was great to learn a little bit more from you.

Thanks everyone for having us. This was a lot of fun.

Karen, amazing moderated discussion, so thanks for moving us along. As a reminder, the recording will be available on SASTR's YouTube channel, so make sure you subscribe. I dropped the link in the chat. And the slides from today will also be posted on SaaStr Slideshare. So watch out for those. And thanks everyone for joining us. This is closing out SCaLE and our last event of 2020. We will see you for Build in 2021.