Scaling for the Enterprise: Top 5 Lessons on the Upmarket Journey with @AirtableApp CEO Howie Liu

Hello.

Hi.

Hey. Thank you. Thanks so much for having us. I love the desk. I feel very much like a talk show host all of a sudden. I'm going to try to make the most of this. You're far away, though.

I know. I feel like I'm here for office hours, but I've been the disobedient student.

My name is Karen. I am a general partner at CO2. I've worked for many, many years in different companies. I was at Facebook for many years. Salesforce, VMware. I've had the great pleasure of knowing Howie for many, many years. I'm sure most of you use airtable, so I don't need to go into very much here. But for those that don't, airtable is a connected apps platform. So think of it like an entire organization can move as one when you use airtable. So whether or not I think it's. What is it, 80% of the Fortune 100 use Airtable. So whether they're design shoes, I can guess who that is. Blockbuster movies or helping to make sure that vaccines are distributed. Airtable is there to solve that. But today we're here to talk about how you scale in the enterprise. Because I know, like, it feels like just yesterday we were talking about this that you just started and now you've scaled up and we've learned a bunch of lessons along the way.

Yeah, from girl Scouts and boy Scouts, club organizations using Airtable and Cow Farmers to now big Fortune 500s. I think it's definitely been a journey.

So we have five lessons from Howie on how to scale and how you think about these lessons as you go up market. So first off, let me jump to the first one. We're going to talk about foundations. So a lot of this is what are the fundamental things that you need to build and how do you sequence them? Like Mark Zuckerberg used to say to me all the time, knowing the big vision is easy, but sequencing it is really hard. So how have you thought about some of the foundational work and the sequencing of what you do when, as you've been building Airtable?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, part of this is, you know, having really clear conviction about what. What the market is that you're going after? I think there's kind of two ways to build a company. One is you build something very quickly. You kind of see if it sticks. If it doesn't, you move on. And, you know, some companies can be built that way. Right. Twitter was a hack project that happened through. Through a pivot of the previous version of the company and it clearly, you know, took off and worked. Right. Whereas something like a SpaceX, of course you can't just, you know, iterate your way into probably rockets that don't blow up. And I think with Airtable it was much more premeditated. You know, I had had the chance to work at Salesforce after it acquired a previous company I founded and, and in just, you know, seeing the, the potential of the low code space from pretty early on, like I think in the 201112 timeframe, and recognizing the power of like, what if you could make an app platform that anyone could use and configure to their own needs. I think we had pretty clear, you know, focus on this opportunity and then it made it easier to break that down into okay, what are the biggest things we need to de risk? And so the first version of our product actually, you know, was a prototype, purely ux, you know, focused. So we created a front end and you know, I think initially wireframes and then interactive prototype and completely fake the backend. Because even though there was a lot of technical complexity there, we knew we would have to go and build this real time relational database engine. The first starting point was just if we can't distill the these UX concepts into something that's really intuitive that anyone can pick up and just start building with, then it's kind of dead on arrival. So we just, you know, I think we were very deliberate about figuring out like what are the key unlocks to de risk this opportunity and you could follow that all the way through you know, our 10 years of existence to now. You know, it's really about seeing if we can go into more and more complex large scale enterprise deployments and going wall to wall, you know, becoming this connected apps platform where it's not just one off apps that are created, but really a whole network of them. And you know, that's the thing we're really betting on now. So I think at every point, knowing what is the next milestone to de Risk, the bigger next frontier of the company's potential and it's cool because you.

Probably can see it, but then you still have to figure out, okay, I need to go backwards and then figure out what are the steps.

Yeah, and I think that is the constant dilemma, I think emotionally as an operator is you want to have this charisma and vision and excitement about what the company could be. Right. If you're just always stuck in the here and now and like what's going to happen tomorrow, you don't have the, you know, the aspiration or, you know, you don't see where the company can be. And this is probably the hard part about early stage investing, right is you know, you have to be able to squint and see past what, what, you know, one year old or even a one month old company is today, but what it could be at the same time as an operator especially, you have to, yeah, you have to execute and you can't be too hot in the clouds. And so I think, I think that's one of the unspoken challenges of the journey is like to maintain that, that duality of vision and like where do we want to get towards in five years but then be super executionally focused on like what are the details of what we need to build now? And for us a lot of it is just like the nitty gritty mechanics of enterprise sales and success and making sure our product roadmap is aligned to support the needs of these more really sophisticated deployments.

Yeah, I mean I think people underestimate how important executing in the short term is to get to the long term for sure. Which sort of throws into the second lesson I just want to run to this one I find intriguing where you talk about choosing your competitors and making a conscious decision there. And I find that interesting because I think there's this fallacy that people are saying, well I have this set of competitors, I don't get to choose them. And I think what, particularly when you're creating a category which is something that Airtable has done, you have more say in who you compete with than I think people perhaps realize. And like, what was your journey there? Especially as you thought about like well what is this category and how do I do that?

Yeah, I think this comes back to this framing of like, you know, the short term versus long term or even like, you know, know the outside in look at the company. So you know, objectively, you know, investors or analysts are going to assess your competitive landscape in a way that you don't have full control over. Obviously you can, you know, try to pitch your company in a certain way, but ultimately you know, other people are going to put you in a certain box and you can't control that in the near term, however, you know, as operators you do have control over how you execute and the choices you make. From a go to market standpoint, which accounts are you prioritizing? You know, which, you know, what types of product functionality are you prioritizing to serve a certain segment of the customer base? And so I think over A multi year time horizon. You can say, you know, our aspiration is actually to move out of this space. In our case of productivity, you know, we knew when we launched that there was a very good chance we would be bucketed in with at the time, you know, it was companies like Trello or even before that like Wunderlist. These like task management companies, productivity tools. Right. Or even you know, Google sheets and Excel, you know, spreadsheets. But it was our very, very intentional focus to not be stuck in that, you know, kind of lower end, more tactical, you know, use cases category but instead to push towards what we believe was the much bigger, especially enterprise opportunity around building real apps, robust apps that actually could scale up very high in terms of complexity. So we use this concept of, you know, airtable being both low floor, so very easy to adopt and use.

Low floor.

Low floor, yep. And then also high ceiling. And I think when we launched, the truth is like we were low floor but like maybe medium ceiling, you know. And so understandably we were perceived as sometimes a spreadsheet plus plus. But you know, because we made these deliberate choices to push more and more up complexity, you know, we've been able to raise that ceiling and align a lot of our go to market efforts as well to go into the more serious enterprise multimillion dollar deployments.

Yeah, yeah, I do, I think that that. And that changes who you compete with along the way. Yeah, yeah.

I mean it was for us, you know, going from you know, productivity tools and you know, kind of lightweight project management to now really, you know, we, we want to position ourselves against the Salesforce App clouds and ServiceNow deployments out there. So really robust applications within large enterprises that now, you know, can be built in a much more agile and connected way with airtable.

And you had to earn the right to do that, which you did with the other successes that you went along. It was one of those like it was an earning along the way to have a different competitor set. And yeah, that, that was an important part of it too.

Sequencing is so important and you know, I think had we launched out of the gates talking about, you know, taking on, let's say ServiceNow, it would have been a little bit ludicrous.

Right.

Like it would have, you know, just Khan completely I think over our customers or reporters or you know, investors heads because it just the gap was too wide. But I think that's also where having you know, as the operator, the clarity of like we know we're going to get to here in three years. We know and you know, three. Or in our case, like it took, you know, 10 years to get to where we are today from founding, you know, but we know that's where we want to go. And yet at the same time, every year we can go out and be very, very focused about what we need to do just this year instead of pretending like we're already at year nine or 10, you know, when we're not.

That's. There's a saying, people overestimate what they can do in one year and drastically underestimate what they can do in 10. And I think that's part of it. So the next lesson, you and I talk a lot about this, but this is your. I love the way you say this. Shrink your tam. So airtable is a horizontal platform. It can do anything. That is beautiful. That is wonderful. It is a huge tam that is a feature and it's a bug.

Yep.

Especially when you're starting out. Yeah. So how have you thought about this given the TAM is infinite?

It is, yeah. It is a blessing and a curse. You know, I feel like in my earlier, you know, time starting airtable or even the company I briefly worked on before airtable, I was always very paranoid about not having a big enough tam. And I recall even, you know, in high school or college when I was thinking about doing startups, you know, dreaming, dreaming up different ideas, you know, I would always, you know, get really worried like, oh, this idea isn't big enough. I want to do something that is like a really, really big opportunity. I don't just want to build, you know, a small piece of software for like a very niche use case. And I think that, you know, there's a healthy, you know, basis for that, that, that paranoia. Right. Like you don't want to wedge yourself into a too small of a market, but I think you can end up on the other extreme, which is you have such a big market that, you know, you can't tackle it all all at once. Right. So if our bigger, you know, like multi decade long opportunity is to democratize software creation for, you know, everyone and in particular, you know, create useful apps within every company that are built and managed by, you know, the line of business themselves, like people who are actually doing their jobs, you know, building, you know, marketing campaigns or launching products, like they're the ones who should be building their own apps, you know, that is even, that is a massive opportunity. Right. I mean, certainly like multi deca billion revenue opportunity, but it's so big that it doesn't actually give you that much guidance on where to focus your efforts. And so I think what we've learned is, you know, like sometimes you actually need to shrink your tam. That sounds so, it sounds like counterintuitive. It sounds very wrong to say. I feel like, you know, like there's, there's probably some, you know, jumbo shrimp. Yeah, like that's like do not, yeah, do not do this. But you know, it's true. And I think, you know, in our case, an example of how we've been doing this is, you know, the truth is like we have very heterogeneous adoption. Like there's almost every industry, country, company.

Size, you were saying like cows and.

Cattle farmers, you know, to like, you know, managing, you know, fashion retail companies and like product launches and so on.

So I used to joke and you make coffee.

Yeah.

You can do anything.

You know that, that, that feature is coming maybe in the future. Yeah, we, you need the add on espresso attachment. It's an upsell. But, but you know, it's, there's such a broad market like company size segments, you know, the use cases, what function we sell into. And you know, we've already been pooled into this really heterogeneous base of adoption. Like we see organic usage across all these different types of use cases. But it makes it really hard from a product and a go to market standpoint to actually focus our efforts and make sure we're providing the best possible experience or that we are repeatedly marketing and selling to our best possible customers. And so what we've done is, you know, while maintaining the horizontality, if that's a word, of the underlying platform. You know, we always want to make sure the platform, you know, is more like a Lego experience where you can build anything you want with it. Yet at the same time, Legos don't just sell as, you know, a, you know, bunch of random pieces. They also sell, you know, the boxes that have, here's the Castle one, here's the Star Wars Farm 1, Star wars, you know, great one, the Millennium Falcon. But, but you know, you can buy these packaged kits. And so I think we're also identifying, hey, you know, it turns out a lot of companies are using airtable for product roadmapping and product operations, you know, tracking their user feedback and triaging that. And you know, if we can do that really, really well for a few customers, why can't we go and repeatedly market and sell and also build the product to be the best possible experience for every other customer that might have that need. Right. And so kind of creating vertical Edges on top of a horizontal platform has given us this much sharper focus and we've seen the results speak for themselves, like being able to much more easily sell into the same use case, same buyer type again and again and again and make sure that our product is actually delivering on those needs. It's just a much easier way to execute than trying to be all things to all people.

And you can really say you are the best at this.

Right.

It is such an amazing thing to know like this is. And to focus the teams.

Yeah, yeah. And it's. And going back to the choosing your competitors, it allows you to then actually put yourself up against the competitors for that subcategory. So you know, for instance, in, in the product operations use case, we're actually competing against vertical specific, you know, product planning tools out there. And, and so being able to actually, you know, position ourselves against them and, and really test our own mettle of, you know, how good are we actually for this use case? I mean, obviously we're a very great horizontal platform. We have all the relational database and the low code functionality to be a really great, you know, best in breed, low code app platform. But on top of that, can we be the best in breed, you know, vertical solution for this use case or that use case?

And I think it's interesting because you are this connected apps platform, you bring the benefit of that to what you're now focused on. So it's important where you started because it has all of the benefits of being able to be connected in this next.

Yeah, and I think that's, you know, this is kind of a lesson that organically emerged for US over the 10 years we've been working on our table. But I think the best kind of strategy comes from the fusion of, you know, what's organically already working. Like, you know, you don't have to go and, you know, push, you know, a rock uphill. Right. There's something already working for us that was, you know, finding these use cases that were repeatedly and organically emerging across our customer base, creating deep, deep value for enterprises and also that, you know, these enterprises were looking to, you know, then build out other apps that were adjacent to it. So for instance, you know, with a lot of the content production companies out there, like Netflix, you know, there's this, you know, central production workflow and then all these adjacent things related to that. And so the idea of being able to connect all of those, you know, work streams together with shared sources of truth, you know, is, is how we kind of decided to Lean into this idea of connected apps and making that our North Star. At the same time, you know, when we look at it kind of top down or outside in, we, we also recognize this is a great strategic advantage for us. Right. Like we can start with one use case. We don't have to stop there. We can actually gain these network effects and actually compound our value within an enterprise because we allow the company to build other apps adjacent to it and they all kind of interconnect and work well together. So you know, we do need to, or want to be the best in breed product for any one use case. But then we have this asymmetric advantage as we build out use cases around it because you know, we just connect those use cases more seamlessly together than you would get with disparate tools or if it was all in spreadsheets or, or anywhere else.

Yeah. And you always say like, listen to your customers, like they'll tell you a lot.

Yeah.

If you listen.

And you have to ask the right questions too.

Right, Right. So in terms of the go to market strategy, you hear these sort of two different sides. There's product led growth and there's enterprise sales. And it's like choose now. How are you thinking about that? Is it a choice? Is it what have you seen?

Yeah, I mean it's funny, you know, 10 years ago when we were going out and raising our first round of funding, seed round, you know, we, we ended up raising I think a $3 million round which seemed like a lot of money at the time at a 6 million free. So, you know, different time, you know, but, but I remember like all of the investors that we talked to who were knowledgeable about SaaS, almost all of them, you know, framed this as a, you know, kind of a choice, like are you going to be more of this like consumer viral thing that maybe looks like Dropbox? I mean Slack hadn't even launched at the time and there really weren't that many examples of B2B serving companies that had like this product led virality. Or are you going to do like kind of real enterprise sales? Right. And then forget about choose. And I think a lot of that is based on, you know, like most people, whether you know, you're an operator or an investor, you know, you kind of ground your mental models based on historical, you know, data points. Right. And you know, in 2012 there just weren't that many data points of companies, you know, that had really fused PLG with enterprise sales. I mean today with, with Figma's announced acquisition by Adobe for 20 billion. I think, you know, there's more and more validation that like getting this combination right is, is a real thing and can, you know, result in profound benefits from a sales efficiency standpoint, from a, you know, just a business model standpoint. So I think what, what we've tried to do is not see those as, you know, divergent poles, but really try to find the bridge to connect the two. So as a very tangible example, you know, we've started to experiment with cold outbound efforts. Right. You know, in the early days of airtable we were purely inbound, you know, just organic adoption. People would pull out credit cards and then, you know, airtable would spread virally within a company, which is pretty sweet. It's awesome. You know, it's like free money. Like the people are just coming to you and like throwing cash at you for like shipping bits over the Internet to them, right? They give us their bits, we ship back those bits in, you know, kind of collaborative form and we get paid for it. It's great. But what we also found was that, you know, in some cases, especially for the larger companies, like they wanted some more handholding, they wanted to talk to a sales person and eventually a success person. And as we leaned into that motion, we found that the, you know, the power of the product, like the fact that the product was so delightful was intuitive and actually was something that empowered the lines of business as opposed to being something that was very, just purely centrally deployed and managed only was actually, you know, still a really, really huge advantage in even like the more human led sales or success efforts. So finding that bridge between the two and even when we are now going, you know, and experimenting with increasingly, you know, cold outbound, so actually reaching out to customers that don't have, you know, much or any organic usage of airtable, we're finding that the, you know, the delightfulness of the product, the fact that they can actually go and not take our word for the value of the product, but take it over and try it out for themselves in minutes is still a huge advantage. So really finding a way to leverage the PLG with the enterprise sales and vice versa, make sure that, you know, as you invest into the product and improve its functionality that you're also considering, well, you know, how do we serve the needs of customers that are doing more than just small, you know, small scale, self serve things, but actually managing this at scale, you know, it requires effort on both sides or in both directions. But if done well, I think you can actually build, you know, an extraordinary business and frankly, I think it's probably where the future of all enterprise software is eventually moving towards.

I did a post about how it's the hamburger go to market where the product is the meat and it's both buns. It was like very simplified but I do believe that they're important. You can't just have one if you're going to reach your full potential. I find it really interesting but it's hard again to sequence it. So it goes back to timing and what you do first. And you can't do it all right off the bat like you do start from one area or the other.

It's also unfamiliar territory. Right. I mean the case studies for this are being written as we speak and you know, it's much easier to kind of stick to an older model. You know, we're going to just do classic top down enterprise sales. Like there is a playbook for that. You know, the big enterprise software companies have been doing it for decades. But also at the same time I think that model is going to become increasingly, maybe not obsolete but just it's going to be increasingly outdated relative to this new product LED approach. Right. And so almost by definition, I think any playbook that's already tried and true for too long might be at the risk of becoming irrelevant or just inefficient relative to this newer approach that you have to pioneer a little bit.

And because you started with the organic product led, you have the hooks into iteration on the product connected to sales that I think is quite helpful as you connect with that top button or the enterprise sales that's already in your DNA.

I think it's, I mean I've come to really appreciate that both are real crafts. I mean doing enterprise sales well is a craft.

It is a craft.

You know, we use the medic, you know, framework for sales and you know, I've just been really, really impressed at you know, the efforts that our sales team has put into like building this playbook, refining it, making it really efficient and scalable and that is a craft in its own right. In the same way that building great product that has, you know, consumer grade UX is great but I do think net net like it's probably harder to retrofit, you know, delightful, you know, bottoms up adoptable or plg, you know, adoptable product, you know, after the fact than it is to figure out how to start with self serve adoption, PLG and then layer in enterprise sales. So if you are going to sequence, I think it's, you know, it's finding that that PLG product market fit is really foundational and it gives you so much leverage then in, you know, anything that you want to layer on from an enterprise sales and it helps you.

Listen to more customers because you totally, you have them.

Yeah, it's, it's almost like doing drug discovery when you already have a petri dish that's massive and you see lots of little pockets of, you know, here's penicillin, like actually taking action on like you know, bacteria. Like you just have a much larger organic sample size to deal with. And you know, for us like it made the job of discovering what are the best use cases for airtable, what are the best company types, who is, who should be our icp, you know, much easier because we didn't have to invent it on first principles. We just got to look at it empirically and see, oh, these customers are real enterprise logos. They're really getting high value from airtable. They built these use cases themselves. We don't know anything about, you know, let's say you know, global marketing, you know, campaigns and, and marketing for major product launches at like a Fortune 500 company. You know, especially when we were, you know, bright eyed, like you know, entrepreneurs just working in Silicon Valley, like, you know, who didn't know anything about like that world. But I think getting to see our customers build on top of the platform we had created allowed us to learn from them and partner with them almost to see, okay, how do we make our product an even better experience for that and then scale up around that, you know, that things that that product market fit that's already working.

And this leads into our last lesson which is this sense of don't underestimate the importance of a delightful experience in an enterprise product. And I've seen a lot of SaaS products and I think that a lot of times the UI or the UX is an afterthought because it's got great functionality but like my eyeballs are kind of bleeding. But that's cool, it'll be all right. And you've had a consumer sort of DNA that has been very useful and a real sensibility about creating delay light. How do you manage that with the complexity of the enterprise?

It's certainly not easy and I wouldn't even, you know, say that we're, we're, you know, I certainly wouldn't say that we're perfect at it. We are learning as we go. I think part of the challenge is when you do have a low floor, high ceiling product, you know, you can be great for low floor use cases because your product is intuitive and delightful, etc. But the things that you need to do to be a great product at great, you know, at higher levels of complexity, at greater scale, if you have thousands of people using the product, you know, and with much more complex data schemas and, you know, business processes and like the types of logic and interfaces that people are trying to build within their apps are just more complex. You know, it's not even a matter of, it's not just a matter of having a delightful, you know, you know, product experience in terms of ux. It's also a matter of making sure that we have the right, you know, frameworks and, and tooling to allow these, you know, more complex deployments to be managed at scale. Right. To prevent things from becoming chaos. You know, if you think about a product like let's say Google Sheets, you know, it's, I would say it's, it's actually pretty intuitive to start using. You could just type in, you know, you know, text or numbers into any cell, you can create a formula, etc. But then we've all probably experienced like the really messy, overgrown, you know, sheet and sheets and Excel break down much, much earlier than Airtable does because we actually have, you know, kind of the app platform foundations. We have a relational database, you can scale up, you know, a more complex workflow, but it still takes a lot of very intentional investment from us to make sure that we keep scaling with our customers, you know, and now can support, you know, ecosystems of apps being built within the enterprise. So I don't think there's a, I don't know if there's a silver bullet there. And it's, you know, it requires a lot of the hard blocking and tackling of, you know, of actually, you know, deciding what's the product roadmap and what are the trade offs that you're willing to make in terms of where you, you know, bet your resources, you know, but, but I think that it's about kind of pushing on, on that tension and not, not saying it's one or the other, but really striving to uphold, you know, this, this delightful intuitive entry point, that low floor, like holding the ground, if not making even more progress on that, while at the same time enabling a higher and higher and higher ceiling and a bridge between the two really, so that, you know, it's very elegant for a customer to come in, start building a very simple use case in our table, maybe get a data set in there, create a shareable, you know, interface and create a workflow around that, share that within 15 minutes. But if they want to build it up and make it more and more complex over time, we need to support them along that journey and have better features and tooling to allow them to progress to much larger deployments and more complex deployments with grace.

Awesome. Well, those were our five lessons. Do you have any sort of anything we didn't cover last minute thoughts?

I think, I mean, I think the most important thing too is it is a very, you know, I think we're all humans. And as much as, you know, SaaS, businesses can get distilled into metrics and everybody talks about revenue and numbers and, you know, you know, rule of 40 and NDRs, and obviously those are very important metrics of, of, you know, the health and success of businesses in our industry. But I also think there's so much human agency involved in the journey. Right. And going back to the original point about like, you know, balancing that duality of where's the North Star, where do you want to go to, who do you want to compete with versus, like, you know, what are the realities of today? I think it's, you know, it's also really important to just kind of, you know, be kind to ourselves and, you know, and I'm sure everyone in this room has had like, you know, ups and downs and, you know, it's, it's a hard job. Like the hard job. Every, you know, every job in SAS can be very, very challenging. And so I think, you know, patting ourselves on the back every once in a while, you know, it's something that I've learned to do more and more over time is, you know, recognize the wins and kind of appreciate that, you know, we've gotten to where we are through the very human efforts and very intentional efforts of a lot of very motivated and hardworking people that are part of the team. So, you know, and hopefully have fun along the way. Right? Because, you know, life is too short to, you know, even if it's a tough, you know, effort and, and, you know, what we're trying to do requires a lot of intensity and, you know, it can be stressful. You know, if we don't have joy and passion about, you know, not just the nsaid, but also the journey, then I think it, it makes it all, you know, a lot less motivating and meaningful. So.

Sa.