Howie Liu: Decoding Airtable's $11B Valuation; The Impending AI Revolution in Enterprise | E1053

I tend to be a believer that AI has the potential to actually lower the cost of goods and services production, and therefore increase also the demand. There's a potential world, though it's certainly not guaranteed, where we find ways to use more human potential and employ more people because each person is made more productive by AI.

Howie, I'm so excited for this, man. I always love our chats, so thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, it's great to be with you.

I always love to start with like the founding stories, but I wanted to do something a bit different today. I wanted to start with, if you could call yourself up the night before you started Airtable and gave yourself a piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?

The thing about advice is, it's always, uh, 20/20 in hindsight. Um, so there, there's a million little things that I would tell myself, but I think, I think the biggest one is, you know, it's really important to think not just about product market fit. You know, every first-time founder is concerned about product market fit, and there's this adage that like, you know, the second-time founder thinks about distribution. My take on it is a little bit more nuanced, which is, it's still product market fit, but it's about figuring out the right product strategy that marries with an effective go-to-market model that, that lends well to that product, right? So certain products work well in a bottoms-up, viral, you know, organically adopted way. Certain products are single user versus team-centric. You know, accordingly, I think you need to design a go-to-market model, whether it's outbound sales or performance marketing or organic and viral growth, um, that really pairs well with, with that particular product dynamic. In hindsight, we didn't think enough about go-to-market model, uh, in the early days of the company. We just focused on building a good product and, you know, happily and, and luckily, that was good enough to get us to the next phase where we did start thinking about go-to-market. But I think it's something that, that, uh, we could have thought about a lot more.

If you had have thought about it a lot more, what would you have done differently? Because to the outside world, it seems like a perfectly executed PLG strategy. What would you have done differently had you had have thought about it?

I think one of the differences was, you know, we built the product with the ability to become team-centric. So we built, you know, we spent a lot of time engineering the backend to be real-time collaborative in nature, which was not a small technical feat. We thought about the team-centric use cases, uh, and when we started putting out templates, this was a little after we launched, initially, you know, we built, uh, some templates that were more solo user-centric, some that were more team-centric. In hindsight, you know, I wish we had put even more emphasis on the team scale use cases, and especially those use cases that, that involved larger teams, right? I think we got to those sort of organically, but it was a little bit more, um, diffuse. So early on, we got a very large range of different adoption, and, uh, I wish we had guided our adoption more and earlier towards the, the team-centric use cases with the anticipation that those would be the ones that, um, A, monetize better, uh, B, um, you know, lend to more, uh, you know, more go-to-market models, right? You know, if you're taking a single user product out to market, um, it's just harder to make performance marketing work. It's harder to make... You know, you can't really make outbound sales work, right? The economics of, you know, pitching a single user who pays a single and relatively small dollar cost to you, uh, is just hard. So I think being more, um, committed to, uh, from the earliest days, this, the team-centric use cases and even larger teams, um, would have, uh, would have lent better to early on a, a pairing of, uh, more aggressive go-to-market, uh, models.