“The product was in beta and they had no revenue, but they were set on a gutsy vision. HOWIE AIRTABLE LINKEDIN SOFTWARE“When we first met with Airtable they only had a handful of employees,” said Max Gazor, who is a General Partner at CRV, which is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on enterprise software and an investor in Airtable. Stay With The Vision: With Airtable, Liu was going against the conventional wisdom. He was building a horizontal product, which can be daunting for a startup. He was also taking on mega rivals like Google and Microsoft. This does a great job of sparking the imagination and getting customers to think ‘what could I build with this?’”Īnother key feature of Airtable is the template library. This makes it easy for anyone to spin-up and customize an app. They back this up with great customer stories that show the near limitless use cases for the product. “Airtable focuses on the ‘for anyone’ message’ for normal people looking to help their department or team build solutions,” said Duncan Huffman, who is the Director of Product Strategy and Insights at Formstack, “They have a strong ‘get started easy and then add complexity as you need it’ approach that appeals to departmental problem solvers. Simplicity: While many enterprise software companies claim that their applications are easy to use, this is usually far from the reality. But Airtable has broken the mold. The software is like a modern consumer application. There is also the need to seamlessly integrate with many third-party applications. HOWIE AIRTABLE LINKEDIN CODEI realized building out our C-suite was so important and that you don’t have to do everything yourself, you have to build the system that will influence acceleration of the output.Foundation: From the start, Airtable built a rock-solid infrastructure. This was to not only allow for scale but also customization. The fact is that low code platforms can be extremely complicated because of the myriad relationships with data and functions. “A key learning for me is that effort doesn’t always equal outcomes…Creating the right frameworks for accountability and making the right hires drives better outcomes. The difference between the best leaders is they have judgment – instinct built up from years of experience.” “One of the biggest secrets of hiring is you can have all the facts of a problem but ultimately there's never a clear answer to any decision. I needed to elevate myself, let a few balls be dropped and avoid getting caught up in only putting out fires.” There’s that awkward transition phase where you go from a small single team of 20 people then you get to many teams and actual departments. I had just done a leadership 360 and I learned I was micromanaging too much, and at that scale it wasn’t working. “Organizationally at the beginning of the pandemic we were still immature. I had to think about why hasn’t someone else built this product I'm imagining? What about the here and now, what about me is unique, and why should this product exist? Because if we’re really going to deliver on the promise of democratizing software creation the product needs to be super intuitive and powerful.” “It took a lot of incremental validation for Airtable to come to fruition. “When I wanted to come up with an idea in college for a company I knew intrinsically that if you want to scale your impact, provide meaningful value to the world, and be successful you have to find something big enough where you have a differentiated ability to uniquely create value in that space.” HOWIE AIRTABLE LINKEDIN HOW TO“Now we’re actively reaching out to enterprises and helping them map out their processes in Airtable.There’s a delicate balance of leveraging our roots as a horizontal platform, maintaining that breadth of applicability, but finding these key areas, like marketing and product operations and figuring out how to replicate success for the next customer.” The fact that we’re private and don't have to worry about turbulence of the current market allows us to think about that long term outcome and how to come out of this downturn stronger.” “We’re focused on what the business will look like in two, three, four years and are thinking about how we can become a category winner in the long term. “Enterprise software, while not immune to the current climate, can continue to grow if we’re able to deliver on ROI for our customers.” HOWIE AIRTABLE LINKEDIN FULLYou can watch the full interview here, or catch some of the highlights below:įocusing on the long term, especially in an uncertain environment This week, CNBC TechCheck Co-Anchor Jon Fortt sat down with Airtable Co-Founder and CEO Howie Liu for a full hour to discuss the current economic climate, the future of Airtable’s platform, and what he’s learned about becoming a better leader when your startup grows from 20 to more than 1,000 people.
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